A buddy of mine we called R, spent a year in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam begrudgingly helping the US launch jet planes to strafe the people and countryside of Vietnam. He joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War as soon as he got his discharge papers. He and I spent many an hour talking politics, books, and women over the years. One conversation occurred when we were somewhere in California’s Central Valley on Veterans’ Day. As we sat in the shade of some trees in Salinas and sipped surreptitiously on a quart of Rainier Ale, R began talking about friends of his from his Navy days. After all, noted R bitterly, this is our day. He continued by noting how much better vets were treated after they were dead. Shit, he said, you even get a decent burial. And a freakin’ American flag to go with it. When you’re in their goddam uniform, you ain’t no better than a maltreated dog who they’re trying to kill. If you get out alive, they just want you to go away. Especially if you have an ailment that can be attributed to their war. R eventually married and helped raise two children. When he was around fifty he was diagnosed with a disease related to the war that was exacerbated by his reckless lifestyle in the years immediately following his discharge. He met an untimely death a few years ago while waiting for a transplant. He did get a decent burial. And a freakin’ flag.
There are many more men and women who were in the military with their own stories. Some have better endings than others. No one makes it through unscathed. Some just hide their scars better. That’s what a friend who did veterans counseling before he died told me. Washington’s latest wars have produced a new crop of these men and women. Although the wars may be different, the wounds are equally painful.

Often left unsaid when the media writes about returning veterans and their trouble adjusting to civilian life is how a veteran’s loved ones are affected. If one wishes to maintain the vocabulary of modern war, then the appropriate label for the lovers, partners, parents and children of the returning soldier would be collateral damage. Think of a cluster bomb. If the returning veteran is a casualty of the explosions that occur on original impact, then the veterans’ families and loved ones would be those who are the casualties that occur from the bomblets that detonate later. Of course, this scenario of injury and death is also replicated among those whom the imperial army has attacked many more times over.

Author and antiwar organizer Beverly Gologorsky wrote a book a couple years ago titled Things We Do To Make It Home. This book was recently released in paperback by Seven Stories Press. It is a beautifully wrought story of a group of Vietnam veterans, their lovers, families and friends set in the 1990s. Twenty years after their return from the jungles of Nam the world they live in is still littered with the veterans’ experience in combat. Like so many of their real-life comrades, the men in the story have left much damage in their wake. Simultaneously, there is a love that binds them all together. That same love reaches across the lines between suburb and city while it tears relationships into remnants barely held together by threads of memory. There is no blame here, despite the desire to find somewhere to place the despair and anger resulting from the demons that define the lives these men have lived. The women who have loved them despite their better sense, the hopelessness the men hide with drugs and alcohol and the children who wonder where there father really is even when he’s sitting in the same room are portrayed with an emotional and spiritual depth the reader won’t find in newspaper reports about veteran suicides and PTSD statistics. There isn’t a lot of hope in this novel, despite the optimism voiced by some of its characters. These are men who know they were screwed and can’t seem to figure out how to get past the war they were sent to fight. Nonetheless, they go on living life as best as they can while often unaware of the pain they cause–a pain directly related to the guilt they feel because of the injury they caused to those their commanders called the enemy while fighting Washington’s war.

I had another friend named Loren. Like so many others, he was drafted into the Army against his will. When he got his orders to go to Vietnam, he took a truck from the motor pool where he worked and ran it through several gates and a couple of parked cars in the Officer’s Club parking lot at the Colorado Army base he was stationed. He did six months in the stockade and was thrown out of the Army. He celebrated by going to a rock festival and ended up in Berkeley. His father didn’t speak to him for years, but it was worth it to Loren just to have avoided the war. After reading Things We Do To Make It Home, one wishes once again that more soldiers would follow Loren’s example and just refuse to fight.

Mike Whitney: November marks the 10th anniversary of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle. Can you explain why you went even though you knew you might be harassed, gassed, beaten or arrested?

Jeffrey St. Clair: I had no intention of being harassed, gassed, beaten, shot at or arrested. This was Seattle after all. The police don’t act that way in the Emerald City. I didn’t particularly want to go, but Cockburn couldn’t be budged from Petrolia. The Turtles and Teamsters theme turned me off. Many of the groups behind the “official” protest had prostrated themselves at the feet of the Clinton Administration for seven years as they hacked away at the foundations of the environmental, labor and human rights policies that had been in place since the Great Society without so much as a whimper of protest. It had all the hallmarks of another Potemkin protest by the politically neutered progressive bloc. But there were rumblings from the underground that a more impolite demonstration might erupt on the streets. I wanted to show up just in case. Besides, there was an exhibition of paintings by my favorite American artist Morris Graves showing in town. In the end, Graves had to wait.

MW: What groups participated in the demonstrations and was there a common-thread that tied them together?

JSC: The French philosopher Michel Foucault quipped, “It’s resistance that unites us.” So it was in Seattle. If there was a common thread that united Earth Firsters, anarchists, Longshoremen and even wheat farmers from the Great Plains it was resistance against the machinery of government, from the WTO to the Clinton administration to the Seattle Police Department. In the end, this strange melange included even the people of Seattle as they were indiscriminately brutalized by their own cops. The street protests were organized (if you can call it organized) by the Direct Action Network and the Ruckus Society, along with some independent operators such as the Black Bloc. But the over-reaction of the Seattle cops did more to swell the size and intensity of the protests than any of those groups. It was a unique convergence of forces and circumstances that created a one-of-a-kind spectacle that even the Situationists might have enjoyed.

MW: Most people have only heard the media’s version of the events (along with the endless footage of the attack on the Starbuck’s store) Can you explain what the media “got wrong” in their coverage?

JSC: You can’t expect the corporate media to critique global capitalism, can you? In the end, I didn’t think the media coverage of the Seattle demonstrations was that terrible. Of course, the media made no attempt to understand what was driving the protests, but that would have required them to get out on the streets and interview people as concussion grenades were exploding overhead–not something the business press, assembled for the WTO, was comfortable doing. The media certainly globalized the protests and made those street battles an inspiration to activists around the world. I don’t mind seeing those images of Starbucks and Niketown getting whacked. In the end, I think the media, particularly the Seattle media, turned against the cops–at least what I was able to watch in my cramped motel room at the King’s Inn. Give the Black Bloc their due. By smashing a few windows in advance of the WTO, they largely preempted any coverage of the phony labor/green parade and rally and got the cameras out on the streets where they belonged.

MW: 5 Days that Shook the World, the book that you co-authored with Alexander Cockburn and photographer Allan Sekula, is a classic of radical journalism. But I’m afraid it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Apart from the riveting storyline and the high-octane prose, there’s quite a bit of information here that would interest antiwar protesters and civil libertarians. It looks like many of the repressive measures that people associate with the Bush era, actually had took root during the Clinton administration; extralegal surveillance, preemptive arrest, and the rise of paramilitary-type law enforcement. What did Seattle teach you about repression in America?

JSC: The WTO protests exposed what many of us had been writing about for years: the militarization of policing in America. The images of cops dressed in black storm-trooper gear, firing concussion grenades, plastic bullets and tear gas at protesters, business people and shoppers on the streets of America’s most self-consciously progressive (and white) city revealed how thoroughly infected the nation’s police forces had become with these brutal tactics and anti-constitutional measures. Of course, none of this would have come as a surprise to the residents of South Central Los Angeles, where these tactics had been a daily fact of life since at least the tenure of Darryl Gates in the 1980s. But now the traumas of black America had shown up on the streets of one of America’s whitest cities. The Clinton administration had proved with lethal force it was more than willing to trample basic constitutional guarantees at Waco in the horrific and totally unjustified raid on the Branch Davidians, where more than 100 people were burned to death. Of course, at the time few progressives sympathized with Koresh and his followers and many of them defended the actions of the FBI and ATF, even after watching those women and kids go up in flames. It’s also worth noting that the Waco raid saw the Clinton administration trample the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited domestic operations by the US military.

It’s now been proved that the Delta Force had a hand in the Waco catastrophe. Again liberals were mute on this constitutional incursion by Clinton. Then after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Clinton pushed congress to pass the Counterterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was a precursor of the Patriot Act. This law widely expanding policing powers, set up the noxious Joint Terrorism Task Forces, where the FBI set up shop with local cops, and became to criminalize various kinds of dissent and protest. Seattle revealed the maturation of these tactics to middle-class and liberal America.

MW: The book takes a few jabs at liberals (like Medea Benjamin) and Big Labor who didn’t really lift a finger to disrupt the WTO meetings. How do explain the willingness of liberals and labor to roll over and let the corporations decide how they think the world should be divided up? Do you think the Iraq war protests would have been more successful had they used the tactics of WTO demonstrators rather than ambling sheep-like through city-centers waving signs and mooning for the cameras?

JSC: It’s no surprise that the big environmental groups and big labor didn’t try to disrupt the WTO meetings or even come to the aid of the street protesters as they were being brutalized by the cops. All they really wanted was a seat at the negotiating table, even if they knew they were going to get creamed in the negotiations. These groups barely stood up to Reagan and Bush I. They were silly putty in Clinton’s hands, willing to swallow, and at times, even defend every betrayal, from NAFTA and the destruction of welfare to logging in ancient forests. Medea Benjamin is a different story. She wanted to claim ownership of street protests but didn’t want to be tarred by elements that made her funders and friends in the media uncomfortable. Her defense of Niketown was outrageous, but entirely predictable. Witness her recent statements urging a limited, modified pull-out from Afghanistan. She thrives on media stunts, and in order to continue to be a quotable source (even by Bill O.) she needs to distance herself from the more radical elements, in this case, a few black kids helping themselves to some overpriced, sweatshop produced Nike footware liberated by the Black Bloc. It was a pathetic performance.

I don’t think the Seattle experience can or will be repeated. You can only take the ruling class off guard once every few decades. The greatest protest against the Iraq war was done by a single person: Cindy Sheehan and her lonely vigil outside Crawford, Texas. The failure was in the anti-war movement’s inability to capitalize on Cindy’s courageous stand. This illustrates–along with the failure to run the Bush crowd out of town after Katrina–of the deep institutional impotence of the American left, a paralysis that has become even more pronounced in the age of Obama.

MW: “Jeffrey St. Clair’s Seattle Diary” (chapter 2) is just a great read. Can you explain the mood of the crowd and the fear you must have felt when the helicopters were buzzing overhead and the small army of truncheon-wielding robocops were clearing the streets and dragging hundreds of protesters off to jail?

JSC: I wasn’t frightened. It was an altogether exhilarating experience. But then again I didn’t get hit in the head with a plastic bullet or locked up in a stifling bus for 20 hours. A little tear gas now and then is good for the soul.

MW: Here’s the final entry to your “Seattle Diary”:

I walked out on the street one last time. The acrid stench of CN gas still soured the morning air. As I turned to get into my car for the drive back to Portland, a black teenager grabbed my arm. “Hey, man, does this WTO deal come to town every year?” I knew how the kid felt. Along with the poison, the flash bombs and rubber bullets, there was an optimism, energy and camaraderie that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

What was achieved in Seattle that week in 1999?

JSC: It was an inspirational week. Seattle proved that after swallowing seven years of crap from a Democratic regime it was possible for some progressives to awaken from their hibernation and express in a direct and confrontational way their anger with their political masters. It showed that resistance is not only possible, but that it can also be fun. The movement is in repose once again. But, who knows, it make reawaken any time in the next seven years….

Notes on WTO demonstrations by Alexander Cockburn:

“As we wrote at the time, You can take state power by surprise over twenty or thirty years, and state power spends the next two or three decades making sure it won’t happen again. See May/June ‘68 in Paris. The next big anti-WTO rally after Seattle was in Washington DC and as JoAnn Wypijewski reported for CounterPunch after that rally, the Maryland/DC cops had orders to shoot to kill if necessary. You can chart the fanatic vigilance of the state by the near impossibility of demonstrating within eyeshot of Bush or Cheney. There were several instances of people in wheel chairs and a sign, awaiting the Royal Progress of W or C, being hauled off to distant wire pens, there to exercise their First Amendment rights. Jeffrey and I were at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in the summer of 2000 and the armed police presence was beyond belief, with squads of motor bike cops regularly roaring along the sidewalks. It took the arrival of a black president in the White House to persuade the police that it was okay to have a man with a revolver strapped to his leg to demonstrate at an Obama town hall meeting with a sign quoting Jefferson on the need to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.

Of course one’s tendency is to think that a hugely exciting event like the Seattle Days is the beginning of something — but alas, Seattle was more epilogue than overture. The organized left fell apart in the Clinton years and hasn’t effectively reconstituted itself since. In fact in the US the left as an energetic intellectual and political force is nearly dead, engorged by the Democratic Party. Of course there are those who fight on – like us here at CounterPunch, and the fact that we have a large and loyal audience across the world for our stuff encourages us to believe there’s life in the Old Mole still.”

Laird begins each section with an anecdotal tale about some aspect of capitalism’s globalization process and those it affects. From the big box shoppers in North America and Europe to the manufacturing centers of China and from the massive ports of Los Angeles to the homeless individual displaced by the corporate race to the bottom, the narrative describes the nature of these phenomena. The reader is introduced to the health problems suffered by those near the factories producing cheap goods and the increase in the incidence of asthma in the ports cities of Los Angeles county. All of this is backed up with statistics and reportage that proves over and over again that the situation Laird describes is not isolated, but the norm. The economic fallout is presented as well. Laird is spot on in his description of the collusion between capitalist and government to lower wages, purchase materials on the cheap, create an economy based on debt and the transfer of debt and ignore the consequences. He describes how that collusion puts people out of work, moving the responsibility for their welfare onto the taxpayer while the government simultaneously undoes whatever safety nets designed precisely for the purpose of helping capitalism’s castoffs. Although he never comes out and says it directly, Laird’s book provides the reader with clear and familiar examples of the shortcomings of monopoly capitalism. He describes a paradox where most national economies depend on low-cost consumerism at the exact moment that such consumerism is stumbling. Why? Because it is dependent on unsustainable factors like cheap labor, cheap transport, trade imbalances, consumer debt and cheap oil.

In addition, he describes how the very construction of the discount marketplace virtually ensures its own destruction. After all, he writes, prices can only go so low before there is no longer any profit in their selling. More importantly, as regards the current economic situation is the fact of energy resources and their consumption. In a chapter titled “All is Plastic” Laird breaks down the essential link between the price and availability of fossil fuels and the price and availability of bargain goods. From the plastic most of the goods are made from to the cheap fuel used to transport them around the globe, cheap and available hydrocarbons are essential. This means that eventually the consumer will have to accept higher prices to compensate for fuel costs or the corporation will have to decrease its rate of profit even further–something difficult to accomplish since lower rates of profits require more sales to compensate. Laird suggests that this explains why Wal-Mart and other major discounters are looking for new customers in Asia and looking to move some of their manufacturing operations closer to the source of fuel. When one considers this latter fact, the claims that the wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are about oil and natural gas don’t seem far fetched at all. After all, if those military exercises succeed in the way Washington wants them to, then the way will be open for anything Wall Street wants in that region.

Laird’s book is a fine piece of reportage on a world where the economy’s collateral damage includes oil spills and the poisoning of China’s (and other developing nations) working poor; the low wages and illegal labor practices of Wal-Mart leading to the ultimate collapse of a system based on minimizing costs, high volume sales and low profit margins; and a world where debt is the cornerstone of the economy. It is, to paraphrase Laird, a system that represents capitalism in its ultimate creative and destructive capacity. Most likely, it is also our future.

Robinson Crusoe’s ethics are rooted in his inherent imperialism. Being the only representative of his race and culture for 27 of his 28 years upon the island, and considering both superior to all others, he not only endeavors—regardless if it is applicable, necessary, or even viable—to replicate the society from which he came but, through these means, to reign supreme over his environment. Crusoe is culpable because he acknowledges that he has been freed from socially-defined standards and, more importantly, that such standards might, in themselves, be questionable yet, after rationalizing the ethically justifiable course of action, he frequently opts for a more self-aggrandizing, convenient, or profitable avenue.

For example, he criticizes the Spanish Inquisition as being unjust yet forces a Caribbean native whom he has liberated from being cannibalized—not on moral grounds but in order to obtain a servant—to assimilate to his Anglo-Saxon lifestyle. Crusoe never bothers to ask the native’s given name. Instead, to commemorate the day upon which Crusoe acted so gallantly, “the creature” is nonchalantly dubbed “Friday.” Crusoe then demands that the native be clothed despite Friday being uncomfortable in such adornments and, moreover, the climate not requiring such. Furthermore, Crusoe rarely inquires into Friday’s perspectives, customs, or culture (the latter has to offer them), thus implying that Crusoe believes his ways to be implicitly superior as he proceeds to teach Friday to speak English and convert him to Christianity. It is worthy of note that, when Friday is rescued, he grovels at his liberator’s feet. Crusoe does not lift Friday up but permits him to remain in his subservient position so as to establish the desired hierarchy (he has Friday refer to him as “Master”) as well as to satiate his narcissism. Astoundingly, Crusoe allows this to occur not once but twice. (Similarly, prior to Crusoe’s discovery of humans upon the island, he revels in his “sovereignty” over the island’s fauna, as he observes that he has capricious control over whether it lives or dies.) The epitome of Crusoe’s moral myopia toward Friday resides in Crusoe’s lack of empathy after having once been enslaved himself. Most pointedly, being free of societal customs and beliefs, there is no alibi for why he continues to uphold the institution of slavery, especially considering that, for several years, Crusoe and Friday are the island’s only inhabitants. Granted, he does not literally bind Friday in shackles and chains, however, he treats him as an inferior and in a manner which, if back in Europe, he would by no means apply to a fellow Briton.

It is with such happenstance convenience that Crusoe reinforces his religious views before summarily dismissing them. For instance, after several languid gestures toward reverence, once Crusoe is born-again, he maintains a calendar and observes the Sabbath. Yet, when he loses track of the date, his devotion subsequently subsides. Additionally, when he notices that barley has sprouted near his “castle” (shelter), being unable to reconcile how it arrived there, he attributes its presence to God’s will. He then recalls that he’d discarded several husks which might have contained seeds and dismisses divine intervention as being the culprit. Obviously, Crusoe’s level of devotion is dependent upon need (such as illness or desperation) or occurrences which he cannot readily rationalize and his theological fervor abruptly diminishes once he no longer requires assistance or deduces a non-supernatural cause for previously inexplicable events. Not surprisingly, he considers abandoning his faith in favor of another once he is rescued because doing so would be more lucrative (Catholicism is the reigning religion in Brazil, which is where his tobacco plantation resides).

Even in the wake of society, Crusoe is unable to sever himself from his entrepreneurial tendencies and, however futile, desire for material and monetary possessions. Despite his conjectures that, like Jonah, he might have been cast out for his sins (Crusoe would have never found himself stranded had he not set out to sea to procure more slaves), he produces more food than he can consume only to watch it rot. He practices animal husbandry and agriculture after conceding that the island aptly provides for his needs without having to resort to such labor-intensive activities. He even goes so far as to craft a table and chair. As noted, he has a “castle,” but he also possesses another shelter-cum-estate as well, which he refers to as his “bower.” Even after admitting that money has no intrinsic value in a tender-free existence, Crusoe hordes every coin he finds. Lastly, toward the end of his “reign” upon the island, the self-described “king” begins cataloguing people as possessions: He refers to the island’s inhabitants as his “subjects,” prisoners as “my people,” and even perceives specific (and in his mind, civilized) individuals as being his own, i.e. “the Spaniard” quickly metamorphoses into “my Spaniard.”

Other instances of Crusoe’s moral hypocrisy and logistic incongruity include his consenting that cannibals might well be acting upon political or cultural principles and, as a result, it may not his place to pass judgment upon them. (Friday confirms this when he informs Crusoe that cannibalism is the consequence of warfare and is not a standard practice, as evidenced by 17 stranded Britons currently residing peacefully amongst Friday’s people.) Nevertheless, and despite his newfound religiosity, Crusoe—against his better judgment and moral conscious—proceeds to slaughter cannibals in the name of God. He never reconciles the paradox in his condemnation of the cannibals’ capital punishment and his own country’s like sentence for mutiny.

Not surprisingly, Crusoe hasn’t any friends. Rather, his associations are strictly limited to accomplices, acquaintances, or business partners. (After he is rescued, he does go on to marry but never cites his wife by name.) Every individual’s worth is based upon the person’s utilitarian value as Crusoe refuses to permit sentimentality to intervene in his decision-making. This is best evidenced in his selling of Xury, a Moorish youth who aided Crusoe in escaping enslavement, which Crusoe later regrets—not because he misses the boy (though he does)—but because he is in need of additional labor on his Brazilian plantation. Dauntingly, when he is rescued, Crusoe leaves the island to British criminals without attempting to notify those who have set off to sea in search for help—the aforementioned Spaniard and Friday’s father—that there are new, dangerous inhabitants awaiting them upon their return. These individuals are not even an afterthought in that, in lieu of the maritime risks involved atop the political tension between Spain and Britain, Crusoe never bothers to inform us of the rescue mission’s fate, even after returning to the island years later. This omission is all the more insulting given that the seafarers aided Crusoe in retaining control of the island after mutineers came ashore.

What perhaps best outlines the Crusoe’s Machiavellian nature is his reaction to a single footprint which mysteriously appears on the beach one day. Though, upon his initial appearance upon the island, he longed to be rescued, Crusoe gradually becomes apprehensive of any sign of human life, as seen in him automatically assuming the enigmatic mark to be the sign of a hostile presence. Crusoe’s paranoia stems from fear that his comfortable state of existence and omnipotence might be compromised whereas before, when he was unsure of his ability to survive, he longed for salvation. He fears, not only cannibalistic natives, but also Spaniards. Yet ironically, fellow Britons prove to be his greatest threat (thereby negating Crusoe’s ethnocentricity). His megalomania is exemplified by his inability and unwillingness to admit fault even after he has returned to Europe. Various dates in his calendar are blaringly incorrect and, though a simple pen stroke would eradicate the errors and the reader would be none the wiser (while saying nothing of the intellectual integrity that most authors would insist upon in acknowledging the mistakes so as to better represent the conditions under which they were operating), Crusoe chooses to ignore them.

Though he does possess a few redeeming qualities, such as resourcefulness and determination, Daniel Defoe’s character of Robinson Crusoe is by no means a hero or even an admirable human being. He is an unapologetic racist, imperialist, fickle theist, and megalomaniac par excellence. He continually shirks moral obligation in favor of activities wherein he will profit, be it financially or socially, or which will appease his narcissism. His lethargy is only superseded by potential harm or ennui. He displays little moral development in that he rewards those who were faithful to his financial interests while he was stranded—not out of respect or gratitude—but anxiety and vanity respectively: Fearing that the Inquisition may result in martyrdom, he sells his plantation and donates the proceeds, of which “The world will seldom be able to show the like of.” During his valediction, Crusoe declares that he has since cast off once again, thereby implying that—to our knowledge—he might have committed many of the same moral atrocities on his “new adventure.” And why not? What evidence do we have to the contrary that, after 28 years on a desert island, he is any the wiser since this ten-year voyage opens with his return to the island where (in true capitalistic spirit) he divides “his colony[’s]” land into plots before announcing to its populace that it is not permitted to leave?

Michael Yates: Corporate America began to wage what turned out to be a one-sided war against working people in the mid-to late-1970s, when it became apparent that the post-World War Two “Golden Age” of U.S. capitalism was over. As profit rates fell, businesses began to develop a strategy for restoring them. This strategy had many prongs, and one of them was ideological, that is, a struggle for “hearts and minds,” to use a military term now being applied to Afghanistan. The presumed failure of Keynesian economics, marked by the simultaneous existence of escalating inflation and unemployment, gave the ideological struggle its foundation. Maybe there had been too many restrictions placed on the market, and these restrictions (minimum wages, health and safety regulations, laws facilitating union organizing in labor markets; public assistance in the form of money grants, housing subsidies, and the like; restrictions on the flow of money internationally) had led to results opposite those that liberal Keynesians had thought most likely. If these complex arguments could be tied to simple cliches, like “get the government off our backs,” “the unions have gotten too powerful” (with always a hint that they are too radical thrown into the argument), and “welfare queens” (with that always popular whiff of racism), they could provide ideological cover for what was really a matter of corporate economics, namely the making of money.

This ideological attack bore fruit quickly. President Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Volcker, under the guise of fighting inflation, immediately began to snuff the life out of working class communities by forcing interest rates up to nearly 20 percent. Today, Volcker is treated like a hero by Democrats and above reproach (though ignored by President Obama’s more right-wing economic advisors), which shows just how far to the right economic discourse has moved. What Carter began, Reagan completed, firing the Air Traffic Controllers and putting the nail in labor’s coffin. Behind the scenes in all of this and growing in strength for the next twenty years (funded by wealthy business leaders) or so were the right-wing think tanks you mention. Just as retired generals go to work for military contractors and defeated politicians become lobbyists, government economic advisors get jobs at Heritage or the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute. The staffs of these ideological centers churn out endless position papers and studies, which find their way into our newspapers and the offices of our congresspersons. A gigantic network of professors, journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and, today, a television network (Fox) bombard us with right-wing propaganda. That all of this has been successful is seen by the fact that the shibboleths of neoliberalism—such as the needs for privatization of public entities, the free reign of markets, the obviousness of the success of welfare reform, the evils of raising the minimum wage—are all commonplaces today.

While the public now knows that something is rotten, I am not sure that neoliberal ideas are so under attack that they will lose their sway. I think that the tenacity of these ideas owes something to the lack of an ideological alternative, which, in turn, is due to the abject failure of organized labor to provide one. For example, we need universal health care. Labor, however, has not consistently argued in favor of this or supported it at all. Now Congress is poised to enact healthcare legislation that might well be worse than the profit-driven system we have all come to hate. Labor should refuse to support this legislation, but I doubt it will. Then, when the new healthcare plans fail to deliver the goods, the right-wing will be lying in wait, ready to pounce and say, “See, we told you so. The government always makes things worse.” In other words, until there is a radical ideology to replace right-wing thinking, the latter is unlikely to lose its drawing power.

Fred Magdoff: Although these institutions were very successful, along with a number of other forces, in shaping public attitudes toward the economy, the reality of the current severe economic conditions are causing many, including some economists, to rethink their views of how “efficiently” markets function in the real world (as opposed to their ideological make-believe world) and that some different approaches may be needed. People seem to understand that the “big players” played a major role in the crisis, but most of the anger has been placed on the outrageous salaries of the top echelon. Of course, this is just “chump change” compared to the massive amounts at that are transferred to the wealthy through the speculative casino that our economy has become.

　
MW: Socialism has a huge public relations problem. Wouldn’t you agree that socialism has been effectively discredited in the U.S. media and that, even now–with unemployment soaring at 10 percent and more than 300,000 foreclosures per month–the average American worker still believes in the virtues of capitalism? How do you explain this phenomenon?

Michael Yates: Part of my answer here can be seen in my response to your first question. Socialism has, indeed, been discredited here, partly due to its rejection by its natural supporter, namely the labor movement. The CIO expelled in the late 1940s and early 1950s the left-wing forces who built the great industrial unions. When it did this, it abandoned the worker-centered ideology that might have laid the basis for support here for at least the kind of social democracy we find in the Scandinavian nations. This left the ideological field to the enemies of social democracy and socialism. Of course, we cannot ignore the long and inglorious history of police-state repression of those persons and organizations that championed socialism. Our government has never hesitated to arrest, imprison, and even kill the enemies of capitalism. So it has been dangerous to be a radical here, though not so much today when radical ideas aren’t taken seriously and there are no powerful radical organizations left. Suppose that after the Second World War, the left in the labor movement had grown, and the left-led unions had continued to successfully organize workers and win good collective bargaining agreements. Suppose that they had built upon their impressive worker education programs, made inroads in the South, and fought hard against U.S. imperialism and the Cold War. We might have a much different political terrain on which to fight today.

Two other factors that must be considered in the attachment of the working class to capitalism are racism and imperialism. In the past, employers routinely pitted white workers against black, and one weapon they used was to associate black workers (and the civil rights movement) with communism (It was interesting to note in this connection the attempts to make Obama out to be a radical socialist). The claim that black union supporters were reds helped to solidify white support for capitalism. By the same token, anti-imperialist struggles in the poor nations of the world (often former colonies of the rich countries) were typically led by political radicals. These could be made out to be anti-American, and then those in the United States who allied themselves with these struggles could also be labeled anti-American, despite the fact that they might also be supportive of policies that would benefit working people. The schools and the media could be counted out not to try to set anyone straight on any of this.

Now, having said this, I must also say that to the extent that left forces in the United States identified themselves uncritically with the former Soviet Union and its extremely undemocratic political system, they sometimes played into the hands of those opposed to socialism. And I must also admit that socialist forces were, at their strongest, never powerful enough here to force their best ideals permanently into the consciousness of the working class majority. Finally, in the past, the success of capitalism in the United States allowed for some sharing of the wealth with workers, and this, too, made people less willing to entertain radical ideas.

Old and deeply ingrained ideas die hard, and unless there are forces at work to develop new ones and unless there is at least widespread experimentation with new ways to organize production and distribution, little is likely to change, even in the face of economic catastrophe, such as so may working men and women are facing right now. Quite the contrary, workers might be persuaded that actions detrimental to their long-term self-interest need to be taken, such as, for example, draconian measures against immigrants.

Fred Magdoff: There is no question that the term socialism has a public relations problem. But while it’s true that most people don’t fully understand the basic workings of the capitalist system nor what socialism is, there are indications that many people are ready to talk about alternatives—and that includes socialism. The positive public response to Michael Moore’s movie, Capitalism, is one indication. But a Rasmussen poll last spring found that only 58% of American’s say that capitalism is better than socialism. For adults under 30, 37% preferred capitalism and 33% preferred socialism. It’s not clear what the poll results really mean. But it does indicate that people are willing to hear about and talk about alternatives to capitalism.
　
MW: In a chapter titled “Neoliberlism” you focus on the disparity of wealth in the US today. Here’s an excerpt:

By 2006 the top 1 percent of households received close to a quarter of all income and the top 10 percent got 50 percent of the income pie. In 2006, the 400 richest Americans had a collective net wealth of $1.6 trillion, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million people. This degree of income and wealth inequality was last seen just before the beginning of the Great Depression. (pg 50)

Let’s ignore the moral issue for now, and focus on the supply/demand question. Is it possible for an economy to produce sufficient demand when more and more of the wealth and income goes to the upper 5 or 10 percent of the population? (isn’t this proof that capitalism is inherently crisis-prone?)

Michael Yates: If a certain amount of output is produced, an equal amount of income is generated. So, conceptually, there could be enough demand to buy the output, no matter that the incomes generated are getting more unequally distributed. It certainly has been the case that the rich people now getting such a large share of the pie spend gobs of money. And rich foreigners spend a great deal of money in the United States as well. However, the rich also save a lot of money (the more they get, the more they save), and this money does not enter immediately into the spending flow. Working people, on the other hand, can be counted on, by virtue of the limited income that they command, to spend all of their income. Therefore, the more income the rich have, the more savings there will be, and, unless some way is found to convert all this saving into spending on newly-produced goods and services, the more likely it is that there will be a crisis caused by not enough spending (and its corollaries of unsold goods and services and unemployed labor). If we understand that growing inequality is the normal trajectory of capitalist economies, a trajectory only mitigated by the power of organized working people to win a bigger share of the pie for themselves and to compel the government to intervene in the marketplace on their behalf, then it is correct to say that capitalist economies are crisis-prone for this reason alone.

Growing inequality also creates other potential problems for the system. Sometimes it can generate a political crisis, a crisis of legitimacy so to speak. The rich exert tremendous political power, and this power grows as those at the top command a larger and larger share of a society’s income. To the rest of us, the game looks increasingly rigged, with us having little chance to improve our circumstances through individual efforts. More inequality also has harmful social and economic consequences that we don’t normally think of. Recent research has shown that if we compare two entities (two states in the United States, for example) with equal average incomes but different degrees of inequality, then the place with more unequal incomes will also have higher rates of infant mortality, arrest and imprisonment, school dropouts, low infant birth weights, and many other measures of social well-being. Growing inequality actually kills some of us, makes some of us sicker, and puts some of us in jail.

I want to add an important point. To say that capitalist economies are crisis-prone, because of a tendency toward income inequality or whatever other reason, is not the same as saying that these economies are on their deathbeds, no matter how severe a crisis may be. It is possible for an economy to exist in a crisis or a prolonged period of slow growth (stagnation) without it being ready to collapse. In the end, it is political struggle, that is, class struggle, that truly destabilizes an economy and generates conditions in which it is possible to imagine the birth of a new system.

Fred Magdoff: It is one of the many contradictions of the system. If ordinary folk are paid well they can buy a lot of stuff and help keep the system going. So from the point of view of the system as a whole, higher paid workers would help the economy. However, there is only one driving force for individual capitalists–and that’s to make as much money as possible. What might be better for the overall economy can be of no concern to the individual trying to maximize profits. For an analogy, let’s take a look at ocean fishing. Almost every fish species is being fished to the point at which the population crashes. It would make sense for all of the companies operating the large trawlers to cooperate and fish less in order to preserve the resource on which they depend. So what’s good for their long-term future is sacrificed as each individually tries to maximize their catch and therefore profits.

MW: Here’s another excerpt from the book: “In 2006, the financial sector employed about 6 percent of the workers but ‘produced’ 40 percent of the profits of all domestic firms.”(pg 56) A few paragraphs later you add that, “Making money without actually making something turned out to be the largest growth sector of the U.S. economy from the early 1980s to the present crisis.”

This seems to imply that as manufacturing and other parts of the “real” economy have become less lucrative, the trading of paper assets has become Wall Street’s new profit-center, the Golden Goose. What impact has the “financialization” of the economy had on ordinary working people?

Michael Yates: I think that an answer here has two parts. First, it was the neoliberal “revolution” begun in the 1970s that did immense harm to working people. For example, unionization rates began to fall dramatically in the 1980s, as Reagan began his “magic of the marketplace” assault on the working class. Real wages (the purchasing power of our paychecks) began to stagnate in the 1970s and are not much higher today than then. Relatively high-wage public employment began to endure a long period of privatization, which also damaged working class living standards. The move toward “free trade” did workers here no good, as manufacturing began to flee our shores for low-wage havens abroad. None of these things had to do with financialization per se.

Second, however, once the neoliberal attack on working class living standards took hold and incomes began to flow upward, those with a great deal more money began to look for ways to put this money to work. The corporations that they owned also had higher profits, and they did the same. The United States has always had a robust financial sector, though in the past, it was not the tail that wagged the dog as far as our system of production and distribution was concerned. Neoliberalism brought with it a deregulation of international movements of money and goods and services. [It is important to note that we see neoliberalism as a political response to capital’s quest for restored profits beginning in the mid-1970s when the post-Second World War two economic boom ended and the slow growth (stagnation) common to mature capitalist economies reasserted itself.] These, in turn, required a certain amount of financial innovation, to reduce, for example, the risks of fluctuations in currency exchange rates and sharp changes in political conditions that could threaten investments. From these innovations came still more, until finance began to take on a life of its own. And while neoliberalism and direct corporate actions inside workplaces did reduce costs and raise profits, they did not create nearly enough capital spending opportunities (investment) to absorb the growing individual savings and business profits. Finance of one kind or another then began to be seen as a place to dispose of surplus and make still more money. Leveraged buyouts, stock market speculations, real estate “investments,” all took off from the 1980s on, absorbing money that could not find enough opportunities in the real economy of production. As these things happened, financial “innovation” exploded, with all of the alphabet soup of financial instruments we describe in our book.

This explosion of finance proved detrimental to working people in a number of ways. Leveraged buyouts inevitably resulted in the hollowing out of what were often perfectly viable businesses. Companies were saddled with debt, assets were stripped and sold, and workers were furloughed by the tens of thousands. The inflation of asset values gave rise to the notion that it was the job of managers to increase the share price of their businesses—in any way possible. Businesses came to be thought of as mere collections of assets rather than entities that produced things. Asset inflation gave rise to asset speculation and the development of ever more complex financial instruments, all leading sooner or later to financial bubbles and the inevitable bursting of the bubbles. As we have seen, the bursting of financial bubbles has had tremendously negative impacts on working people: shuttered workplaces and unemployment to name but the primary ones. The last bubble, in real estate markets, was harmful to workers not only after it burst but also as it was developing. In the aftermath of the dot.com bubble, Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Fed Board of Governors, directed Fed policy to pressure interest rates down to very low levels. This helped to push loose money into real estate. As house prices began to rise, banks and brokers started to encourage working people to do two things: borrow money against the appreciated value of their homes and buy homes, either as first-time buyers or as purchasers of more expensive homes (after selling old ones). Working people were eager to do both because they saw houses as sources of cash to compensate for stagnating household incomes and as a form of wealth that could help secure them against the hazards of ill health, lost pensions, or college-age children needing money for school. Working class households began to take on large amounts of debt, making themselves more vulnerable, even as they thought they were making wise financial decisions. Ironically, those who saw their incomes rise so high because of neoliberalism were now, in effect, loaning money to those who didn’t fare so well. As banks accumulated mortgages, farsighted Wall Street swindlers saw golden opportunities to develop a slew of new financial instruments based upon the packaging and repackaging of mortgages into new and exotic instruments. Greenspan played their shill, arguing that they had uncovered the secret of hedging infallibly against risk. From here it was but a short step to the criminal schemes of Countrywide and a host of other financial institutions. The billions of dollars made were used not only to finance a new gilded age of revoltingly lavish consumption but to corral the most tractable politicians money could buy.

Fred Magdoff: Financialization of the economy created the possibilities for people to take on more and more debt—credit cards, new cars, 2nd mortgages, etc. It was the selling of a lifestyle way beyond people’s ability to pay for it plus the easy access of loans that created the bind that many people find themselves in today. In essence, it allowed people to live beyond their means. They were encouraged to take on debt as their house values seemed headed up forever, and the great rise in foreclosures and bankruptcies is the unfortunate result of the financialization of the economy. Also, those people who had retirement money in individual accounts or with pension systems and thought that they had become very wealthy, now found themselves with much less to rely upon.

MW: In the last couple of decades, consumer debt has skyrocketed, as you note, “doubling from 1975 to 2005, to 127 percent of disposable income.” (pg 60) Have we gone as far as we can without deleveraging and paying down debts? What happens to a credit-dependent economy when the consumer can no longer increase his/her debt-load? Is this just the beginning of a decades-long down-cycle?

Michael Yates: Certainly no entity—not a person, a family, a business, even a government— can take on rising levels of debt (relative to income) indefinitely. Sooner or later, the piper has to be paid. Working-class consumers took on large amounts of debt, to compensate in part for stagnating wages and incomes, and, it is important to note, to pay for health problems and other household traumas. This meant that the burden of the debt rose, since income wasn’t rising as fast as the debt, and also because the interest rates charged on credit cards and subprime mortgages were so high. We at Monthly Review have been decrying the rise of consumer debt for many years, and we said that the debt chickens would come home to roost sooner of later. I must say that I was surprised that debt could be broadened and deepened for so long. The ingenuity of creditors in extending loan periods and devising so many new forms of debt has to be admired for its audacity. Then, the ways in which these debts were packaged and sold so that more debt could be extended was truly breathtaking. Unfortunately, consumers ultimately couldn’t pay and all hell broke loose. Now, with so much unemployment, workers are truly strapped. They will not be borrowing so much or spending so much anytime soon. [One interesting recent development is that, as some households have defaulted on debts or simply stopped making payments, consumer spending has showed a bit of an upward tick!] So the question arises: what spending will fuel a sustained recovery? It won’t likely be consumer spending. Capital spending was stagnating to begin with and was the root cause of the crisis. There are no new “epoch-making” innovations on the horizon that would generate the amounts of investment that were brought forth by the automobile. U.S. exports seem a very unlikely demand support. That leaves the government. In a capitalist economy, especially one like the United States with its lack of a history of generally accepted public spending, it seems very unlikely that public spending will make up for shortfalls in aggregate demand. Already, there are widespread entreaties (and not just from the far right) urging the federal government to wind down in spending programs—well before, I might add, the economy has recovered. As we see it, the United States is, indeed, in for a long period of stagnation, a “down cycle” as you put it.

Fred Magdoff: This is one of the major constraints on the system. The economy is in a process that economists call “deleveraging,” which is just another way of referring to somehow getting rid of debt. Some are able to pay off what they owe, a few are able to renegotiate down some of their debt, many are losing their homes, and some are going bankrupt. Until this works its way out, and a lot of debt is shed one way or another, there will be a drag on the “consumer” portion of the purchases. This is particularly significant to the U.S. economy because it is so dependent on consumer purchases—in 2007, these absorbed approximately 70% of the goods and services produced.

MW: The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know is as lucid and compelling summary of the financial crisis as any I have read. In the closing chapter you state that capitalism is undergoing a “crisis of legitimacy” and that “the system can never deliver what is needed for us to realize our capacities and enjoy our lives… That “instead of private gain” the purpose of society and the economy is “to serve the needs of people, by providing the necessities of life for all, without promoting excessive consumption (consumerism) while protecting earth’s life support systems.”

All of the things that which kept capitalism in check–progressive taxation, crucial regulations, and the power of unions–have either been reversed, repealed or greatly eroded. More and more people are beginning to see the greed which governs the system, and it scares them. But is the country really ready for structural change or will the vision of an economy which “serves the needs of its people” be dismissed as “pie-in-the-sky” Utopianism?

Michael Yates: Well, first thank you Mike for the kind words. They are much appreciated. Typically, the best we have been able to hope for from the public in the United States has been an amorphous populism; people are willing to say that the system is corrupt and that it is biased in favor of the rich. But proposals for change, much less a radical transformation of the economic system, are rare commodities. I think things would be different, however, if we had a real labor movement, one that was rooted in communities, broad in its composition, and not afraid to have principles and stand by them come hell or high water. This should be the lesson that progressives learned from the right-wing. The talking heads of Fox may seem insane to us, but they and their intellectual gurus almost never deviate from the set of reactionary principles with which they began to transform the “common sense” of the nation. We suggest at the end of our book that we ought to ask ourselves if a return to the pre-economic crisis status quo is what we want. In the best of times, there is plenty of unutilized labor, a degraded environment, poverty, dead-end jobs, and much more that is not so desirable. So we chose a number of alternative outcomes to what we have now that we think have mass appeal, from universal healthcare to basic food guarantees. However, as you say, these might well, and I think will cause people to react with a pie-in-the-sky indifference. What might make working men and women stand up and take notice would be for these goals to have a mass-based advocate, one that would make these goals matters of rigid principle and begin to fight for them through mass actions. We might think that the right-wing ideologues we see on television are insane. Yet, come hell or high water, they stick to their guns. Their political and economic adherents have wielded tremendous power for a long period of time, and even today when they seem to be losing their grip on the national “common sense,” they can still mobilize the faithful. The left needs to take a lesson from this. More particularly, the labor movement must take a firm and rigid stand on issues like national health care, food security, environmental degradation, full employment, good and cheap housing, U.S. war-making and imperialis, racism, and a host of others. Then it must educate members rigorously and constantly about such principles. Most importantly, it must begin to actively fight to achieve them, activating its millions of members and allies, wherever it can find them. It is through action, bold and unafraid, that people’s minds will get changed and a new “common sense” developed.

Having said this, I think it is clear that the labor movement, as currently constituted, is not up to the tasks at hand. Too many unions are moribund, stuck in the failed labor-management cooperation mind set of the past and run by people too old and infirm to do much of anything. So, not only will we have to have a worker-led opposition to the status quo, fighting to change it radically, but this opposition will have to be built on a new basis. There are some hopeful signs, such as the development of community-based worker centers, mainly in immigrant communities. These may be models for the labor movement of the future.

Fred Magdoff: Just getting what should be the most reasonable reforms through Congress is a major effort, which usually fails or is corrupted in the process. Look what’s happening with health care “reform.” Even if a “public option” is finally part of the bill, it will be a bill that helps some people, but is primarily a boon to the health care industry, which will get a lot of new revenue. It’s not a bill designed with the single purpose in mind: how can we supply medical care for everyone at reasonable cost. Rather it’s a bill designed with significant input from the for-profit sector that will end up supplying them with extra profits. It is clear that government-run systems (and there are a variety of ways to do this) are far cheaper and more efficient and can actually cover everyone. SO, it seems as though piecemeal reform is a) very difficult to obtain and b) can be reversed as the power of the wealthy increases. A system is needed that can break the power of the wealthy and create a real political and economic democracy in order to be able to meet the basic needs for all the people.

“A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours.”¹

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote above eloquently summarises the figment of reality entangled with modern Jewish nationalism and especially within the concept of Jewish identity. It obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land. While the brutality of the Israelis towards the Palestinians has already become rather common knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their ‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for many generations to come. Leave aside the megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into enclaves of deprivation and starvation, Israel has managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with nuclear and chemical waste.

The Invention of the Jewish People is a very serious study written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian. It is the most serious study of Jewish nationalism and by far, the most courageous elaboration on the Jewish historical narrative.

In his book, Sand manages to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never shared a common origin. Instead they are a colourful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

In case you follow Sand’s line of thinking and happen to ask yourself, ‘when was the Jewish People invented?’ Sand’s answer is rather simple. “At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people ‘retrospectively,’ out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people.”

Accordingly, the ‘Jewish people’ is a ‘made up’ notion consisting of a fictional and imaginary past with very little to back it up forensically, historically or textually. Furthermore, Sand — who elaborated on early sources of antiquity — comes to the conclusion that Jewish exile is also a myth, and that the present-day Palestinians are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs.

Astonishingly enough, in spite of the fact that Sand manages to dismantle the notion of ‘Jewish people,’ crush the notion of ‘Jewish collective past,’ and ridicule the Jewish chauvinist national impetus, his book is a best seller in Israel. This fact alone may suggest that those who call themselves ‘people of the book’ are now starting to learn about the misleading and devastating philosophies and ideologies that made them into what Khalid Amayreh and many others regard as the “Nazis of our time.”

Hitler Won After All

Rather often when asking a ‘secular’ ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew what it is that makes him into a Jew, a shallow overwhelmingly chewed answer would be thrown back at you: “It is Hitler who made me into a Jew.” Though the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew, being an internationalist, would dismiss other people’s national inclinations, he insists upon maintaining his own right to ‘self determination’. However, it is not really he himself who stands at the core of this unique demand for national orientation, it is actually the devil, master-monster anti-Semite, namely Hitler. Apparently, the cosmopolitan Jew celebrates his nationalist entitlement as long as Hitler is there to be blamed.

As far as the secular cosmopolitan Jew is concerned, Hitler won after all. Sand manages to enhance this paradox. Insightfully he suggests that “while in the 19th century referring to Jews as an ‘alien racial identity’ would mark one as an anti-Semite, in the Jewish State this very philosophy is embedded mentally and intellectually.”² In Israel Jews celebrate their differentiation and unique conditions. Furthermore, says Sand, “There were times in Europe when one would be labelled as an anti-Semite for claiming that all Jews belong to a nation of an alien type. Nowadays, claiming that Jews have never been and still aren’t people or a nation, would tag one as a Jew hater.”²

It is indeed pretty puzzling that the only people who managed to maintain and sustain a racially orientated, expansionist and genocidal national identity that is not at all different from Nazi ethnic ideology are the Jews who were, amongst others, the leading targeted victims of the Nazi ideology and practice.

Nationalism In General and Jewish Nationalism In Particular

Louis-Ferdinand Celine mentioned that in the time of the Middle Ages in the moments between major wars, knights would charge a very high price for their readiness to die in the name of their kingdoms; in the 20th century youngsters have rushed to die en mass without demanding a thing in return. In order to understand this mass consciousness shift, we need an eloquent methodical model that would allow us to understand what nationalism is all about.

Like Karl Deutsch, Sand regards nationality as a phantasmic narrative. It is an established fact that anthropological and historical studies of the origins of different so-called ‘people’ and ‘nations’ lead towards the embarrassing crumbling of every ethnicity and ethnic identity. Hence, it is rather interesting to find out that Jews tend to take their own ethnic myth very seriously. The explanation may be simple, as Benjamin Beit Halachmi spotted years ago. Zionism was there to transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land registry.’ For that matter, the truth of the Bible or any other element of Jewish historical narrative has very little relevance as long as it doesn’t interfere with the Jewish national political cause or practice.

One could also surmise that the lack of clear ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from feeling an ethnic or national belonging. The fact that Jews are far from being what one can label as a People and that the Bible has very little historical truth in it, doesn’t really stop generations of Israelis and Jews from identifying themselves with King David or Terminator Samson. Evidently, the lack of an unambiguous ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from seeing themselves as part of a people. Similarly, it wouldn’t stop the nationalist Jew from feeling that he belongs to some greater abstract collective.

In the 1970’s, Shlomo Artzi, then a young Israeli singer who was bound to become Israel’s all-time greatest rock star, released a song that had become a smash hit in a matter of hours. Here are the first few lines:

   All of a sudden
   A man wakes up
   In the morning
   He feels he is people
   And he starts to walk
   And to everyone he comes across
   He says shalom

To a certain extent Artzi innocently expresses in his lyrics the suddenness and almost contingency involved in the transformation of the Jews into people. However, almost within the same breath, Artzi contributes towards the illusionist national myth of the peace-seeking nation. Artzi should have known by then that Jewish nationalism was a colonialist act at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Seemingly, nationalism, national belonging and Jewish nationalism in particular create a major intellectual task. Interestingly enough, the first to deal theoretically and methodically with issues having to do with nationalism were Marxist ideologists. Though Marx himself failed to address the issue adequately, early 20th century uprising of nationalist demands in eastern and central Europe caught Lenin and Stalin unprepared.

“Marxists’ contribution to the study of nationalism can be seen as the focus on the deep correlation between the rise of free economy and the evolvement of the national state.”³ In fact, Stalin was there to summarise the Marxist take on the subject. “The nation,” says Stalin, “is a solid collaboration between beings that was created historically and formed following four significant phenomena: the sharing of tongue, the sharing of territory, the sharing of economy and the sharing of psychic significance…”³

As one would expect, the Marxist materialist attempt to understand nationalism is lacking an adequate historical overview. Instead it would be reliant upon a class struggle. For some obvious reasons such a vision was popular amongst those who believe in ‘socialism of one nation’ amongst them we can consider the proponents of a leftist branch of Zionism.

For Sand, nationalism evolved due to the “ rapture created by modernity which split people from their immediate past”.⁴ The mobility created by urbanisation and industrialisation crushed the social hierarchic system as well as the continuum between past, present and future. Sand points out that before industrialisation, the feudal peasant didn’t necessarily feel the need for an historical narrative of empires and kingdoms. The feudal subject didn’t need an extensive abstract historical narrative of large collectives that had very little relevance to the immediate concrete existential need. “Without a perception of social progression, they did well with an imaginary religious tale that contained a mosaic of memory that lacked a real dimension of a forward moving time. The ‘end’ was the beginning and eternity bridged between life and death.”⁴

In the modern secular and urban world, ‘time’ had become the main life vessel which illustrated an imaginary symbolic meaning. Collective historical time had become the elementary ingredient of the personal and the intimate. The collective narrative shapes the personal meaning and what seems to be the ‘real.’ As much as some banal minds still insist that the ‘personal is political,’ it would be far more intelligible to argue that in practice, it is actually the other way around. Within the post-modern condition, the political is personal and the subject is spoken rather than speaking itself. Authenticity, for the matter, is a myth that reproduces itself in the form of symbolic identifier.

Sand’s reading of nationalism as a product of industrialisation, urbanisation and secularism, makes a lot of sense when bearing in mind Uri Slezkin’s suggestion that Jews are the ‘apostles of modernity,’ secularism and urbanisation. If Jews happened to find themselves at the hub of urbanisation and secularisation, it shouldn’t then take us by surprise that the Zionists were rather creative as much as others in inventing their own phantasmic collective imaginary tale. However, while insisting on their right to be ‘like other people’ Zionists have managed to transform their imagined collective past into a global, expansionist, merciless agenda as well as the biggest threat to world peace.

There Is No Jewish History

It is an established fact that not a single Jewish history text had been written between the 1st century and early 19th century. The fact that Judaism is based on a religious historical myth may have something to do with it. An adequate scrutiny of the Jewish past was never a primary concern within the Rabbinical tradition. One of the reasons is probably the lack of a need of such a methodical effort. For the Jew who lived during ancient times and the Middle Ages, there was enough in the Bible to answer most relevant questions having to do with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As Shlomo Sand puts it, “a secular chronological time was foreign to the ‘Diaspora time’ that was shaped by the anticipation for the coming of the Messiah.”

However, in the light of German secularisation, urbanisation, and emancipation, and due to the decreasing authority of the Rabbinical leaders, an emerging need of an alternative cause rose amongst the awakening Jewish intellectuals. The emancipated Jew wondered who he was, where he come from. He also started to speculate what his role might be within the rapidly opening European society.

In 1820, the German Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) published the first serious historical work on Jews, namely The History of the Israelites. Jost avoided the Biblical time, he preferred to start his journey with the Judea Kingdom, he also compiled an historical narrative of different Jewish communities around the world. Jost realised that the Jews of his time did not form an ethnic continuum. He grasped that Israelites from place to place were rather different. Hence, he thought there was nothing in the world that should stop Jews from total assimilation. Jost believed that within the spirit of enlightenment, both the Germans and the Jews would turn their back to the oppressive religious institution and would form a healthy nation based on a growing geographically orientated sense of belonging.

Though Jost was aware of the evolvement of European nationalism, his Jewish followers were rather unhappy with his liberal optimistic reading of the Jewish future. “From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a ‘kingdom’, expelled into ‘exile’, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.”

For the late Moses Hess, it was a racial struggle rather than a class struggle that would define the shape of Europe. Accordingly, suggests Hess, Jews better return and reflect on their cultural heritage and ethnic origin. For Hess, the conflict between Jews and Gentiles was the product of racial differentiation, hence, unavoidable.

The ideological path from Hess’s pseudo scientific racist orientation to Zionist historicism is rather obvious. If Jews are indeed an alien racial entity (as Hess, Jabotinsky and others believed), they better look for their natural homeland, and this homeland is no other than Eretz Yizrael. Cleary, Hess’s assumption regarding a racial continuum wasn’t scientifically approved. In order to maintain the emerging phantasmic narrative, an orchestrated denial mechanism had to be erected just to make sure that some embarrassing facts wouldn’t interfere with the emerging national creation.

Sand suggests that the denial mechanism was rather orchestrated and very well thought out. The Hebrew University decision in the 1930’s to split Jewish History and General History into two distinct departments was far more than just a matter of convenience. The logos behind the split is a glimpse into Jewish self-realisation. In the eyes of Jewish academics, the Jewish condition and Jewish psyche were unique and should be studied separately. Apparently, even within Jewish academia, a supreme status is reserved for the Jews, their history and their self-perception. As Sand insightfully unveils, within the Jewish Studies departments the researcher is scattering between the mythological and the scientific while the myth maintains its primacy. Yet, it often gets into a stalling dilemma by the ‘small devious facts.’

The New Israelite, the Bible, and Archaeology

In Palestine, the new Jews and later the Israelis were determined to recruit the Old Testament and to transform it into the amalgamate code of the future Jew. The ‘nationalisation’ of the Bible was there to plant in young Jews the idea that they are the direct followers of their great ancient ancestors. Bearing in mind the fact that nationalisation was largely a secular movement, the Bible was stripped of its spiritual and religious meaning. Instead, it was viewed as an historical text describing a real chain of events in the past. The Jews who had now managed to kill their God learned to believe in themselves. Massada, Samson and Bar Kochva became suicidal master narratives. In the light of their heroic ancestors, Jews learned to love themselves as much as they hate others, except that this time they possessed the military might to inflict real pain on their neighbours. More concerning was the fact that instead of a supernatural entity — namely God — who command them to invade the land and execute a genocide and to rob their ‘promised land’ of its indigenous inhabitants, within their national revival project it was them as themselves, Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weitzman, Ben Gurion, Sharon, Peres, Barak who decided to expel, destroy and kill. Instead of God, it was then the Jews killing in the name of Jewish people. They did it while Jewish symbols decorate their planes and tanks. They followed commands that where given in the newly restored language of their ancestors.

Surprisingly enough, Sand who is no doubt a striking scholar, fails to mention that the Zionist hijacking of the Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German Early Romanticism. However, as much as German philosophers, poets, architects and artists were ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not exactly Hellenism’s sons and daughters. The nationalist Jew took it one step further, he bound oneself into a phantasmic blood chain with his mythical ancestors, not before long he restored their ancient language. Rather than a sacred tongue, Hebrew had become a spoken language. German Early Romanticist never went that far.

German intellectuals during the 19th century were also fully aware of the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. For them, Athens stood for universal, the epic chapter of humanity and humanism. Jerusalem was, on the contrary, the grand chapter of tribal barbarism. Jerusalem was a representation of the banal, non-universal, monotheistic merciless God, the one who kills the elder and the infant. The Germanic Early Romantic era left us with Hegel, Nietzsche, Fichte and Heidegger and a just a few Jewish self-haters, leading amongst them, Otto Weininger. The Jerusalemite left us with not a single master ideological thinker. Some German Jewish second-rate scholars tried to preach Jerusalem in the Germanic exedra, amongst them were Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzveig and Ernst Bloch. They obviously failed to notice that it was the traces of Jerusalem in Christianity, which German Early Romanticists despised.

In their effort to resurrect ‘Jerusalem,’ archaeology was recruited to provide the Zionist epos with its necessary ‘scientific’ ground. Archaeology was there to unify the Biblical time with the moment of revival. Probably the most astonishing moment of this bizarre trend was the 1982 ‘military burial ceremony’ of the bones of Shimon Bar Kochva, a Jew rebel who died 2000 years earlier. Executed by the chief military Rabbi, a televised military burial was given to some sporadic bones found in a cave near the Dead Sea. In practice suspected remains of a 1st century Jew rebel was treated as an IDF casualty. Clearly, archaeology had a national role, it was recruited to cement the past and the present while leaving the Galut out.

Astonishingly enough, it didn’t take long before things turned the other way around. As archaeological research become more and more independent of the Zionist dogma, the embarrassing truth filtered out. It would be impossible to ground the truthfulness of the Biblical tale on forensic facts. If anything, archaeology refutes the historicity of the Biblical plot. Excavation revealed the embarrassing fact. The Bible is a collection of innovative fictitious literature.

As Sand points out, the Early Biblical story is soaked with Philistines, Aramaic and camels. Embarrassingly enough, as far as excavations are there to enlighten us, Philistine didn’t appear in the region before the 12th century BC, the Aramaic appears a century later and camels didn’t show their cheerful faces before the 8th century. These scientific facts lead Zionist researchers into some severe confusion. However, for non-Jewish scholars such as Thomas Thompson, it was rather clear that the Biblical is a “late collection of innovative literature written by a gifted theologian.”⁵ The Bible appears to be an ideological text that was there to serve a social and political cause.

Embarrassingly enough, not much was found in Sinai to prove the story of the legendary Egyptian Exodus, seemingly 3 million Hebraic men, women and children were marching in the desert for 40 years without leaving a thing behind. Not even a single matzo ball, very non-Jewish one may say.

The story of the Biblical resettlement and the genocide of the Canaanite which the contemporary Israelite imitates to such success is another myth. Jericho, the guarded city that was flattened to the sounds of horns and almighty supernatural intervention was just a tiny village during the 13th century BC.

As much as Israel regards itself as the resurrection of the monumental Kingdom of David and Salomon, excavation that took place in the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1970’s revealed that David’s kingdom was no more than a tiny tribal setting. Evidence that was referred by Yigal Yadin to King Solomon had been refuted later by forensic tests made with Carbon 14. The discomforting fact has been scientifically established. The Bible is a fictional tale, and not much there can ground any glorifying existence of Hebraic people in Palestine at any stage.

Who invented the Jews?

Quite early on in his text, Sand raises the crucial and probably the most relevant questions. Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? How is it that in different historical periods they appear in some very different and remote places?

Though most contemporary Jews are utterly convinced that their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites who happened to be exiled brutally by the Romans, truth must be said. Contemporary Jews have nothing to do with ancient Israelites, who have never been sent to exile because such an expulsion has never taken place. The Roman Exile is just another Jewish myth.

“I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land” says Sand in a Haaretz interview, “but to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”

Indeed, in the light of Sand’s simple insight, the idea of Jewish exile is amusing. The thought of Roman Imperial navy was working 24/7 schlepping Moishe’le and Yanka’le to Cordova and Toledo may help Jews to feel important as well as schleppable, but common sense would suggest that the Roman armada had far more important things to do.

However, far more interesting is the logical outcome: If the people of Israel were not expelled, then the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah must be the Palestinians.

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years” says Sand. “But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.’”

In his book Sand takes it further and suggests that until the First Arab Uprising (1929) the so-called leftist Zionist leaders tended to believe that the Palestinian peasants who are actually ‘Jews by origin’ would assimilate within the emerging Hebraic culture and would eventually join the Zionist movement. Ber Borochov believed that “a falach (Palestinian Peasant), dresses as a Jew, and behaves as a working class Jew, won’t be at all different from the Jew”. This very idea reappeared in Ben Gurion’s and Ben-Zvi’s text in 1918. Both Zionist leaders realised that Palestinian culture was soaked with Biblical traces, linguistically, as well as geographically (names of villages, towns, rivers and mountains). Both Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi regarded, at least at that early stage, the indigenous Palestinians as ethnic relatives who were holding close to the land and potential brothers. They as well regarded Islam as a friendly ‘democratic religion’. Clearly, after 1936 both Ben-Zvi and Ben Gurion toned down their ‘multicultural’ enthusiasm. As far as Ben Gurion is concerned, ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seemed to be far more appealing.

One may wonder, if the Palestinians are the real Jews, who are those who insist upon calling themselves Jews?

Sand’s answer is rather simple, yet it makes a lot of sense. “The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others.”

Clearly, monotheist religions, being less tolerant than polytheist ones have within them an expanding impetus. Judaic expansionism in its early days was not just similar to Christianity but it was Judaic expansionism that planted the ‘spreading out’ seeds in early Christian thought and practice.

“The Hasmoneans,” says Sand, “were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. It was this tradition of conversions that prepared the ground for the subsequent, widespread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the 4th century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions — pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.”

The Jews of Spain, whom we believed to be blood related to the Early Israelites seem to be converted Berbers. “I asked myself,” says Sand, “how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina’s Jewish Berber Kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism.”

As one would expect, Sand approves the largely accepted assumption that the Judaicised Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which he calls the Yiddish Nation. When asked how come they happen to speak Yiddish, which is largely regarded as a German medieval dialect, he answers, “the Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the east, and thus they adopted German words.”

In his book Sand manages to produce a detailed account of the Khazarian saga in Jewish history. He explains what lead the Khazarian kingdom towards conversion. Bearing in mind that Jewish nationalism is, for the most part, lead by a Khazarian elite, we may have to expand our intimate knowledge of this very unique yet influential political group. The translation of Sand’s work into foreign languages is an immediate must.

What Next?

Professor Sand leaves us with the inevitable conclusion. Contemporary Jews do not have a common origin and their Semitic origin is a myth. Jews have no origin in Palestine whatsoever and therefore, their act of so-called ‘return’ to their ‘promised land’ must be realised as an invasion executed by a tribal-ideological clan.

However, though Jews do not constitute any racial continuum, they for some reason happen to be racially orientated. As we may notice, many Jews still see mixed marriage as the ultimate threat. Furthermore, in spite of modernisation and secularisation, the vast majority of those who identify as secular Jews still succumb to blood ritual (circumcision) a unique religious procedure which involves no less than blood sucking by a Mohel.

As far as Sand is concerned, Israel should become “a state of its citizens.” Like Sand, I myself believe in the same futuristic utopian vision. However, unlike Sand, I do grasp that the Jewish state and its supportive lobbies must be ideologically defeated. Brotherhood and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and have no room within the concept of Jewish national revival. As dramatic as it may sound, a process of de-judaification must take place before Israelis can adopt any universal modern notion of civil life.

Sand is no doubt a major intellectual, probably the most advanced leftist Israeli thinker. He represents the highest form of thought a secular Israeli can achieve before flipping over or even defecting to the Palestinian side (something that happened to just a few, me included). Haaretz interviewer Ofri Ilani said about Sand that unlike other ‘new historians’ who have tried to undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography, “Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of years.” This is indeed the case, unlike the ‘new historians’ who ‘unveil’ a truth that is known to every Palestinian toddler; i.e., the truth of being ethnically cleansed; Sand erects a body of work and thought that is aiming at the understanding of the meaning of Jewish nationalism and Jewish identity. This is indeed the true essence of scholarship. Rather than collecting some sporadic historical fragments, Sand searches for the meaning of history. Rather than a ‘new historian’ who searches for a new fragment, he is a real historian motivated by a humanist task. Most crucially, unlike some of the Jewish historians who happen to contribute to the so-called left discourse, Sand’s credibility and success is grounded on his argument rather than his family background. He avoids peppering his argument with his holocaust survivor relatives. Reading Sand’s ferocious argument, one may have to admit that Zionism in all its faults has managed to erect within itself a proud and autonomous dissident discourse that is far more eloquent and brutal than the entire anti-Zionist movement around the world.

If Sand is correct, and I myself am convinced by the strength of his argument, then Jews are not a race but rather a collective of very many people who are largely hijacked by a late phantasmic national movement. If Jews are not a race, do not form a racial continuum and have nothing to do with Semitism, then ‘anti-Semitism’ is, categorically, an empty signifier. It obviously refers to a signifier that doesn’t exist. In other words, our criticism of Jewish nationalism, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power can only be realised as a legitimate critique of ideology and practice.

Once again I may say it, we are not and never been against Jews (the people) nor we are against Judaism (the religion). Yet, we are against a collective philosophy with some clear global interests. Some would like to call it Zionism but I prefer not to. Zionism is a vague signifier that is far too narrow to capture the complexity of Jewish nationalism, its brutality, ideology and practice. Jewish nationalism is a spirit and a spirit doesn’t have clear boundaries. In fact, none of us know exactly where Jewishness stops and where Zionism starts as much as we do not know where Israeli interests stop and where the Neocon’s interests start.

As far as the Palestinian cause is concerned, the message is rather devastating. Our Palestinian brothers and sisters are at the forefront of a struggle against a very devastating philosophy. Yet, it is clearly not just the Israelis whom they fight with rather a fierce pragmatic philosophy that initiates global conflicts on some gigantic scale. It is a tribal practice that seeks influence within corridors of power and super powers in particular. The American Jewish Committee is pushing for a war against Iran. Just to be on the safe side David Abrahams, a ‘Labour Friend of Israel’ donates money to the Labour Party by proxy. More or less at the same time two million Iraqis die in an illegal war designed by one called Wolfowitz. While all the above is taking place, millions of Palestinians are starved in concentration camps and Gaza is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. As it all happens, ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews and Jews in the left (Chomsky included) insist upon dismantling the eloquent criticism of AIPAC, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power posed by Mearsheimer and Walt.

Is it just Israel? Is it really Zionism? Or shall we admit that it is something far greater than we are entitled even to contemplate within the intellectual boundaries we imposed upon ourselves? As things stand, we lack the intellectual courage to confront the Jewish national project and its many messengers around the world. However, since it is all a matter of consciousness-shift, things are going to change soon. In fact, this very text is there to prove that they are changing already.

To stand by the Palestinians is to save the world, but in order to do so we have to be courageous enough to stand up and admit that it is not merely a political battle. It is not just Israel, its army or its leadership, it isn’t even Dershowitz, Foxman, and their silencing leagues. It is actually a war against a cancerous spirit that hijacked the West and, at least momentarily, diverted it from its humanist inclination and Athenian aspirations. To fight a spirit is far more difficult than fighting people, just because one may have to first fight its traces within oneself. If we want to fight Jerusalem, we may have to first confront Jerusalem within. We may have to stand in front of the mirror, look around us. We may have to trace for empathy in ourselves in case there is anything left.

1. When And How The Jewish People Was Invented Shlomo Sand, Resling 2008, p 11.
2. Sand, p 31.
3. p 42.
4. p 62.
5. p 117.

Hart has the credentials to tackle the subject of Zionism (specifically, political Zionism: that a certain collection of non-native people has a, purportedly, God-given right to a particular piece of real estate that overrides the rights of Indigenous Palestinians) having worked for over three decades covering history unfolding in the Middle East. Much of his experience is first hand. The False Messiah is volume one of, what is planned to be, a three or four volume series Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews
Volume One: The False Messiah
By Alan Hart
Paperback: 337 pages
Publisher: Clarity Press (2009)
ISBN-10: 0932863647
ISBN-13: 9780932863645

Disseminating information that challenges the immensely influential Zionist bloc is difficult. Hart wrote, “… all in the UK were too frightened to publish this book out of fear of offending Zionism too much and being falsely accused of promoting anti-Semitism.” Here Hart exposes the absurd inversion of morality: Zionists accuse defenders of Palestinian human rights as being racist against the abuser of Palestinian human rights!

Hart identifies it as a smear tactic and a phony one since Arabs are Semites.

That the morality of Zionism is challengeable was keenly illustrated by an exchange between Hart and erstwhile Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Hart queried Meir on-air: “You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and even the whole world down with it?”

Meir’s prompt response: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

How do Zionists get away with crimes against humanity? Hart points to the suffering Zionists experienced in the WWII Holocaust. To this an obvious question arises: does victimization give the victims the right to victimize another people?

Paulo Freire in his opus Pedagogy of the Oppressed warned that oppression creates a recycling dynamic that dehumanizes not only the oppressed people but also the oppressor. Hart touches on this dynamic.

Zionism and Judaism

Hart has to cover a lot of ground.

He points out that Zionism is not Judaism. Hart describes Zionism as “brutal and cruel [behaviors], driven by self-righteousness of an extraordinary kind, without regard for international law and human rights conventions” which “makes a mockery of the moral values and ethical values of Judaism.”

Hart does not delve deeply into these moral and ethical values of Judaism, but he leaves this reader with the impression that Judaism is an principled faith. However, the laws and morality underlying many religions are often interpreted variously. The late Israel Shahak, a chemistry professor and social justice activist, in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years rued that classical Judaism had been subverted toward profit and Jewish supremacism. I submit that much as no people should be seen as a monolith neither should a religion be regarded as a monolith.

The Legitimacy of a Jewish Claim to the Holy Land

Hart reasons that there is no legitimacy to Israel’s claim to a “right to exist.” Moreover, the Jewish claim to the Holy Land does not hold up under scrutiny.

The bloodlines of the majority of Israeli Jews do not tie them with the Holy Land. Ashkenazim stem from eastern and central Europe and are converts to Judaism. Hart cites the work of Joseph Reinach, Alfred Lilienthal, Arthur Koestler, and Shlomo Sand in outlining this case. The refutation of Jewishness as an ethnicity is important because, quoting Sand, “…it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews” that allows Zionists to claim Israel as a Jewish state.

Furthermore, writes Hart, the Mizrahim (Semitic Jews indigenous to the Middle East) were strongly opposed to Zionism.

Hart focuses on two different sets of Jews: Haskala Jews who sought to make the place they lived their home and Zionist Jews who strive to separate Jews and Gentiles. Haskala Jews see themselves threatened by a backlash to crimes committed by Zionist Jews.

Early Zionism

Hart paints a picture of early Zionist history and the roles of early Zionist figures such as Zionism’s “founding father,” Theodr Herzl, key lobbyist, Chaim Weizmann, and the financier of Zionism, Lionel de Rothschild.

Hart details the collaboration of Britain with the Zionists from Arthur Balfour whose letter provided a pretext to dispossess Arabs. The chicanery was such that Britain reneged on its promise to recognize the sovereignty of its WWI Arab allies. Britain, writes Hart, laid the foundations for a Zionist takeover: “Without the British presence Zionism could not have entrenched itself in Palestine. On their own the Palestinians could have pushed the Zionists out.”

Britain went so far as to declare war on the Palestinians and assassinate Palestinian leaders.

All along the way, Zionist Jews were opposed by Haskala Jews who, as history shows, always lost out. After WWII, the Holocaust card was effective at backing down Haskala Jews.

Yet, Zionism has also flourished among Jews living abroad. Citing humanist Lilienthal: the migrating Jews carried a “nation complex” within them. According to Hart, this “made many of them susceptible to Zionism’s nationalist propaganda.”

Later, Zionists such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Vladimir Jabotinsky would terrorize the British out of Mandate Palestine. Hart sources Ralph Schoenman on the Koening Memorandum that made transparent the Zionists’s plans for terrorism against Palestinians: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”

Israel today, Hart notes, defines legitimate Palestinian resistance as terrorism. The author holds, “… all peoples have the right to use all means including violence to resist occupation.”

The US and Zionism

As Imperial Britain headed into decline, Imperial USA was ascending. The US would have a greater role in the Middle East.

Hart lauds US president Woodrow Wilson, “a real, towering statesman, a true giant among men.” Woodrow was apparently hamstrung on Palestine by his lobbying for the League of Nations. Hart blames “Imperial Britain-and-Zionism and their allies in [the US] Congress and the media; with … France” for screwing Wilson on Palestine.

Hart presents many “what if” scenarios. For example, he quotes British official John Hope Simpson: “Had the Jewish authorities been content with the original object of settlement in Palestine – a Jewish life without oppression and persecution in accordance with Jewish customs – the national home would have presented no difficulty.”

Or what if president Franklin Roosevelt had not died when he did? Hart speculates that Roosevelt would have rejected a Jewish state in Palestine.

Hart identifies influential Zionist agents in the White House, among others, David K. Niles. Although Truman is depicted as a president who grappled with the Zionist lobby, he had a vulnerability exploitable by Zionists.

Biting the Hand that Feeds

Ends would justify the means for Zionists. Even though Britain had set the stage for Jewish immigration to Palestine, even though Britain was at war with Nazi Germany — Zionists sought out a possible collaboration with Britain’s wartime enemy and an enemy to Jews. Hart sources Marxist writer Lenni Brenner who disclosed the Zionist negotiations with Nazi Germany. Zionists were dedicated to thwarting Jewish immigration to elsewhere than Palestine and were even willing to sacrifice Jewish lives to realize the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine.

And it was Jewish terrorism that forced Britain out of Palestine.

Zionism and Terrorism

The Zionist plan was to drive the British out, then drive the Palestinians out. Hart relates the strategy of the man who would become Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, for keeping all the land: creating facts-on-the-ground. The problem with this strategy is that if old facts-on-the-ground can be erased to establish new ones, what is to stop new facts-on-the-ground from being created again?

The methods for creating these facts-on-the-ground were incredibly gruesome. The massacre at Deir Yassin is a historical testament to Zionist war crimes – “in its own tiny way it was another holocaust.” The village was a “soft and easy target”; “the butchers of Deir Yassin” killed 254 victims, mainly the elderly, women, and children. One-hundred-and-forty-five women were killed, 35 of them pregnant. Many were raped before being killed.

Hart quotes Mordechai Nisan of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.” [emphasis added by Hart]

Abdul Khader, portrayed as a respected Palestinian resistance leader, died the day after the Deir Yassin Massacre. Gloom set in on the Palestinian side. Deir Yassin had its intended effect, sowing fear in the hearts of Palestinians, and the expulsion was underway.

Arab and International Complicity with Zionism

The Palestinians did not just have to deal with British treachery, they “were at the mercy of the Arab League” who at British insistence kept the Palestinians unarmed, much as the illegal sealing of Gaza’s borders today and control of the West Bank borders keeps Palestinians unarmed under brutal occupation and creeping dispossession.

Hart wonders: what if the Arab regimes of the time had sought an alliance with Stalin to defeat Zionism? He speculates that Truman might have had to stand up to Zionism.

Hart points out that the United Nations General Assembly, in defiance of its own charter which calls for respect for the principle of self-determination, would, aided by Zionist manipulation (disinformation, bribery, threats), decree an illegal partition of Mandate Palestine. Not only was the partition illegal, he argues, it was also unfair. Jews would receive 56.4 percent of the land while being 33 percent of the population and owning only 5.67 percent of the land. The valuable coastal and fertile areas were in Jewish hands while mountainous, infertile areas were left to the Palestinians. Hart calls it “a proposal for injustice on a massive scale.”

In the end, Truman capitulated to Zionism and recognized the partition. Truman had been subjected to “a political hit-squad of 26 pro-Zionist U.S. Senators” beholden to Jewish votes and money.

Truman’s secretary of state George Marshall resisted Zionism, putting “America’s national interests first and, to the limit of the possible within that context, doing what was legally and morally right.” Joining Marshall in opposition was US secretary of defense James Vincent Forrestal who might have been the most steadfast opponent of the corrupting influence of Jewish money on the Democratic Party had he not, according to Hart, died under suspicious circumstances. Nonetheless, the Zionists had access to a more influential actor on Truman.

Hart takes a sympathetic slant toward Truman, noting he had kept the Zionist lobby at bay until it discovered his Achilles heel: his good friend Eddie Jacobson, a non-Zionist Jew. Through Jacobson, Zionists could reach Truman.

It appears that Truman, although much irked by the selfishness of the Zionist lobby, bore much of the responsibility for opening the door to the influence of money from lobbyists. Grant F. Smith in his book America’s Defense Line supports this view: “The historical record reveals how Truman’s policy on the Palestine question became heavily influenced by his need for campaign contributions…” Smith credits Truman with starting a “competition to see who was more ‘pro-Israel’” among US presidential candidates. Smith presents evidence that Truman was swayed by “massive funds” for his 1948 presidential campaign raised with the help of arch-Zionist Abraham J. Feinberg.

The Brazilian pedagogue Freire theoretically described — without referring to it –what underlies the Zionist-Palestinian dynamic: that of the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire argued that oppression and the struggle of liberation from oppression are both oppressing. Oppression, he contends, is necrophilic. “Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation that oppresses them.’”

To overcome the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, the oppressed must see themselves as agents of change. Revolution requires solidarity, and this, said Freire, is achieved through love — affirmation of one’s humanity. The act of rebellion by the oppressed is a gesture of love. The desire to be human saves oppressors from their own dehumanization caused by oppressing other humans.

“It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors,” wrote Freire.

Many Haskala Jews believe that liberation for all Jews will come from Palestinians achieving their liberation.

This looks like the direction Hart is heading with his Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews series. Volume One: The False Messiah is an important reference on what has transpired in the lead up to and formation of the Jewish State by Zionists. He brings valuable first-hand perspective, such as what lay behind Meir’s statement that there were no Palestinian people.

Hart gives a human face to some of the historical protagonists, portraying them not merely as actors but delving into the character of the persons. It is as if Hart seeks to humanize some of the persons who capitulated to Zionism.

However, there is no reason that evil should always appear in the guise of a demon. Humans come in all shades. Evil acts are evil despite the appearance of the evil-doer. Yes, it is probably much easier to perpetrate evil acts in cherubic rather that demonic guise, but why play to such stereotypes?

Hart’s book is a good act, a brave act for someone from British state media. He says he has to live with himself, and it is obvious this book comes from a place of integrity. Volume One: The False Messiah augurs well for the rest of the series.

Even if the stock market can be shored up by more government borrowing for “stimulus” spending, it’s a temporary reprieve, because nothing can bring back the consumer purchasing power that was lost when the banks stopped pumping money into the economy through out-of-control mortgage lending. We simply no longer have the job base for people to earn the income they need to live.

The underlying cause of the crisis is in fact the debt-based monetary system, whereby the U.S. ruling class long ago sold out our nation and its people to the international banking cartel of which the Rockefeller and Morgan interests have been the chief representatives for over a century. It was lending on a previously unheard of scale for overpriced assets to people and businesses unable to repay that created the bubbles that burst in 2008, not only in the housing market but also in such areas as commercial real estate, equities, commodities, and derivatives. It was an explosion that reverberated throughout the world.

The Obama administration’s response to the crisis has been to print Treasury bonds both for the financial system bailouts and the sputtering Keynesian stimulus that so far has gone substantially into military infrastructure. This bond bubble is what I have referred to as “Obama’s Last Picture Show.”

Government debt is fundamentally inflationary. For a generation, the U.S. dollar has been inflating at an increasing rate, with the economy being kept in a growth posture by selling our debt instruments abroad or allowing foreigners holding dollars to purchase property and other assets on our own soil. The website EconomyinCrisis.org reports that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, “foreign entities spent $267.8 billion to acquire or establish U.S. businesses.”

Foreigners are spending their dollars as fast as possible, because they are now plummeting in value. It’s increasingly clear that sooner rather than later, the dollar will be dumped by foreign purchasers of bonds, particularly China, and possibly even the oil-producing nations.

These nations know full well that bonds denominated in dollars can never be completely repaid, even if the bonds can be rolled over into fresh debt. It’s this dynamic that is dragging the U.S. economy to the cliff, because real economic growth stopped long ago when our manufacturing jobs were exported. This is because most of the growth since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 has been only on paper through financial bubbles. This included the dot.com bubble of the Clinton years that blew up in 2000-2001.

Now, after the Treasury bond bubble of 2009, there is nothing left in America to inflate. With so many jobs gone, the American family home was the last thing of value we owned.

So the air is going out of the tires. Americans who are struggling to work for a living are passive spectators as their jobs, savings, health insurance, pensions, and homes continue to erode in value or even disappear. Last Sunday the Washington Post reported a massive crisis in state and local government pensions. Reporter David Cho wrote, “The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees.”

So what, if anything, can be done about it?

Well, the first thing an intelligent physician does is diagnose the disease. Thomas Greco, in his new book The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Chelsea Green: 2009) , outlines the increasingly familiar story of how things got so bad, and he tells it as well as anyone has ever done. His style is precise and sometimes academic. Behind it, though, is a passion for truth and the type of rock-solid integrity that refuses to sugar-coat a very bitter pill.

More than that, Greco writes about how to change what has gone wrong. His credentials as an engineer, college professor, author, and consultant are impeccable. His book is among the most important written in this decade. It is truly a book that can alter the world and, if taken seriously, give large numbers of people a practical way to survive the gathering catastrophe.

But unlike most commentators, what Greco offers is not another phony prescription for what the financiers and government should do for us, whether through “restarting” lending or another round of stimulus spending. Rather it’s what we should do for ourselves, and could do much better, if we understood what to do and if big banking and big government just got out of the way.

As I said, at the root is the monetary system, whose failure cannot be understood without a history lesson. So Greco writes about the struggle between banking and democracy that took place in the 1790s when the ink on our new national constitution was barely dry.

It was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, who compromised the new nation, through what he admitted was “corruption,” by giving the wealthy speculators in Revolutionary War bonds the benefit of federally-sponsored redemption and then by establishing the First Bank of the United States. This early drift toward elitist rule was opposed by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others who figured in the creation of what later became the Democratic Party.

Greco writes: “While Jefferson favored a stronger union than that which emerged under the Articles of Confederation, he was vehemently opposed to the reconstruction of monarchic government on the American continent.” Hamilton had said frankly that the British monarchy was the best system of government known to man. Part of the monarchic system was the Bank of England, which Hamilton copied when setting up the First Bank.

But Jefferson, who repudiated Hamilton’s elitist platform, was elected president in what was then called “The Revolution of 1800.” Congress refused to renew the Bank’s charter by a single vote when it was up for renewal in 1811.

But the Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 due to the government debt left behind from the War of 1812 against Great Britain. Thus was set up what became known as the “Bank War.”

It was President Andrew Jackson who dethroned the bankers from power by pulling government funds out of the Second Bank in 1833. Greco writes that in Jackson’s view: “The ‘Bank War’ was a contest for rulership—would the United States be governed by the people through their elected president and representatives, or by an unelected financial elite through their central bank instrument?”

The modern takeover began in earnest during the Civil War when Congress passed the National Banking Acts in 1863-64 which mandated use of government bonds as bank lending reserves, thereby creating a direct linkage between bank profits and the debt the government was starting to load on the shoulders of taxpayers.

The nation’s fate was sealed with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The deal was that the bankers would control the currency, and thereby the nation’s economy, while the government would be provided with an unlimited amount of inflated dollars to fight its wars.

The bookkeeper’s trick of creating money out of thin air, charging interest for its use, then forcing it down the throats of weaker nations by threat of violence, is what has allowed the Anglo-American empire, since the founding of the Bank of England in 1696, gradually to conquer the world. Though President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, he saw what that action meant. Greco cites Wilson as writing: “There has come about an extraordinary and very sinister concentration in the control of business in the country…. The great monopoly in this country is the monopoly of big credits.”

Among other ill effects, the system has ruined the value of the currency. The inflation caused by large issues of bank-created loans is seized upon by the government which goes along because inflation reduces the cost of its deficits. Investors buy Treasury bonds denominated in Federal Reserve Notes then watch their value evaporate over time. In fact Federal Reserve Notes have lost over 95 percent of their value since they were first introduced.

Moreover, it’s additional inflation caused by bank-generated interest that drives up the costs of goods and services, forcing everyone in the economy to try to defend themselves by raising their prices to the max. Greco spells this out too, which almost every economist in the world, with the exception perhaps of Australia’s James Cumes, overlooks.

Bank interest has other tragic effects. It was high interest rates, for instance, that destroyed the Idaho potato industry. A farmer from that region told me at a conference a few years ago that when interest rates skyrocketed in the early 1980s, he asked the president of one of the Federal Reserve Banks why they did it. The answer was they were “ordered” to raise interest rates by the international banking system.

Make no mistake, it’s the banking system, facilitated by the Fed, not unwary borrowers, who brought on the collapse of 2008.

Now, in 2009, the bankers, mainly those in the U.S., have so shattered the world economy by debt mounted on debt that there may be no reprieve except the creation of a slave society based on rule by the rich over the masses of whatever peons should happen to survive the downturn and its tragic effects on employment, health, the food and water supply, and even our ability to cope with climate change.

The political establishment, expressing itself in pronouncements by organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, see a future, not of economic democracy or increased financial pluralism, but consolidation of world currencies into a small number overseen at the top by the world’s financial oligarchy. Citing the writings of Benn Steil, the CFR’s Director of International Economics, Greco writes: “The ostensible plan is to reduce global exchange media to three—one each for Europe, the Americas, and Asia. One might reasonably suppose that at a later stage, those three would be combined into one currency also under the control of the global banking elite.”

Greco concludes: “The New World Order is upon us.”

With ample justification, he even goes apocalyptic, citing The Book of Revelation in demonstrating the import on a spiritual plane of the elitist takeover: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” (Revelation 13: 16-17)

But is it really the end, or is there a new world waiting to be born? Greco thinks so. He speaks of the end of an era when unlimited economic growth fed by massive influxes of debt-based money is no longer sustainable. He writes: “That our global civilization cannot continue on its current path seems evident….But I think our collective consciousness is beginning to change. We are becoming aware of limits and are reaching that part of our evolutionary program that says, ‘Stop!’”

Part of the awareness of how to stop must focus on the institutions responsible for the crisis. Greco praises Ron Paul for calling out the Federal Reserve in the 2008 presidential campaign. He cites a statement Paul made to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in a 2004 hearing where Paul told Greenspan that the power of the Fed “challenges the whole concept of freedom and liberty and sound money.” Thus Paul and other monetary reformers, though largely ignored by the mainstream media and political establishment, have made it clear that change must start with what really lies at the bottom of elite control: how money is made and who makes it.

Unfortunately, few progressive economists, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich comprehend the monetary causes of today’s disasters. Instead of demanding reforms that would make money the proper servant of a sustainable economy, most call for more stimulus spending; i.e., more government debt, along with “reform” of a financial system that is corrupt down to its very DNA.

So do we really need the bankers’ fake currency, today backed by nothing but a federal deficit of $12 trillion and growing by the day?

Greco says we don’t, and this is what his book about. But it’s not about doing without the necessities of life, or heading for the hills with a gun and backpack. Nor is it about important efforts at macro-level monetary reform like those of the American Monetary Institute, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, or advocates for a basic income guarantee. Rather it’s about individuals, groups, and communities taking control of the monetary system at the grassroots level and creating an entirely new basis for trade than bank-owed debt.

Greco writes about “a new paradigm approach to the exchange function.” The solution, he says, “is to provide interest-free credit to producers within the process of mutual credit clearing. That is the process of offsetting purchases against sales within an association of merchants, manufacturers, and workers. It will eventually include everyone who buys and sells, or makes and receives disbursements of any kind.”

Greco is one of the world’s leading experts in describing alternative or complementary currencies. These are self-regulating systems that facilitate “reciprocal exchange,” not using government legal tender but which are still allowed under the currency laws so long as taxes are not evaded.

Greco discusses the large and growing worldwide “LETS” movement—Local Exchange Trading Systems, like the Ithaca HOURS system in Ithaca, New York. He describes the Swiss WIR Bank, the longest-running credit clearing system in the world, with over 70,000 members. He writes about the national and international barter exchanges that involve over 400,000 businesses trading at an annual level of $10 billion.

Greco also describes the world-famous Mondragon Cooperatives from the Basque region of Northern Spain. Started by a Roman Catholic priest in 1941, the Mondragon system, he says, is “the hub of what is probably the most successful and progressive social cooperative economy in modern history.”

He also tells the inspiring story of the Argentine trading clubs—the trueques—which, when used with “provincial bonds” issued by regional governments, rescued that country during the 2001 economic collapse brought on by the collusion between the Argentine government and the International Monetary Fund.

Credit clearing is not new. Greco traces it to the medieval European fairs. These exchanges are like banking clearing houses. The world’s largest is the automated clearing house—ACH—operated by the Federal Reserve.

But as Greco points out: “The clearing process need not be restricted to banks; it can be applied directly to transactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services. The LETS systems that have proliferated in communities around the world use the credit clearing process, as do commercial trade exchanges. Credit clearing systems are, in essence, clearing houses—but their members are businesses and individuals instead of banks.”

Alternative currency and trading systems, says Greco, are the wave of the future. Even though most only mount up to partial local successes, they show what can be done. Greco likens these efforts to the Wright Brothers’ first flight that covered 120 feet. They show, he says, that the potential exists for local, regional, then national and international money-free exchanges that eventually could be joined by a single web-based trading platform. This could eventually get rid of the corruption of debt-money altogether.

Chapter 16 of the book is about “A Regional Economic Development Plan Based on Credit Clearing” that shows the potential. Greco writes, “The credit clearing exchange is the key element that enables a community to develop a sustainable economy under local control and to maintain a high standard of living and quality of life.”

This would be a real revolution. What can governments do to help? Perhaps only by removing, as Greco recommends, the privileged position of bank debt-money as legal tender. Instead, let bank money compete with market-based alternative currencies and credit exchanges, if it can.

Greco’s book is a how-to-do-it manual that updates and expands on his previous books, Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis, New Money for Healthy Communities, and Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. Greco also operates a website that offers advice and support to worthwhile community initiatives.

My own view is that no one should wait to see who takes the lead in creating the monetary and credit-clearing systems of the future. The time is now. There is no more reason to delay. If the people of the world do not join together in this kind of action, they can likely kiss their economic future and perhaps their livelihoods good-bye. The controllers of the world, those with the big money, the ones who run the banking systems, who own the global corporations, and who finance politicians like Obama, the Bushes, and the Clintons, are now poised in their blindness to extinguish the light of democracy on the planet for good.

Greco is implying that the power of the elite is not only dated but illusory. Thus the way to proceed is not just to oppose them. If they are opposed, they’ll do what they always do, which is to roll out the SWAT teams, the military in the streets, the tear gas, the sound cannon, the concentration camps, the Patriot Acts, the torture chambers, because that is all they know, and it’s what they do best.

The money monopoly translates into a monopoly on violence on an ascending scale. We know that the U.S. sells more weapons abroad than any other nation, and we know that it is war above all that makes the bankers rich.

So let them have their weapons and wars. With all due respect to those brave enough to protest, it’s time for people simply to walk away and set up their own economic and monetary systems as a prelude to a rebirth of humanity as ethical beings in sustainable communities of choice.

The keys, says Greco, are simple: “Promote the establishment of private complementary exchange systems—and use them. Buy from your friends and neighbors wherever possible. Contribute your time, energy, and money to whatever moves things in the right direction.”

Greco also recommends that the unit of exchange for alternative currencies be based on the value of commodities—not necessarily gold or silver, which bankers and governments manipulate, but those commodities readily available within a trading system. State and local governments should do everything possible to protect, encourage, nourish, and participate in these systems.

The irony is that what may appear on the surface to be technical changes in how the exchange of goods and services takes place can have such profound effects. The answer is that systems of exchange reflect entirely different perceptions of the world. Bank-money exchange reflects and creates a system of elite control and human slavery. Reciprocal credit exchange reflects and creates a democratic system on a level monetary playing field.

The difference points to the fact that such reform is, above all, a spiritual endeavor. Thomas Greco has devoted decades to this quest and is one of its foremost visionaries. In an Epilogue he writes: “We will either learn to put aside sectarian differences, to recognize all life as one life, to cooperate in sharing earth’s bounty, and yield control to a higher power—or we will find ourselves embroiled in ever-more destructive conflicts that will leave the planet in ruins and avail only the meanest form of existence for the few, if any, who survive.”

It’s a vision we can all strive to embrace.

Hinton’s book is a fascinating, absorbing and detailed account of land reform in a single Chinese village, Long Bow, near Changzhi in a liberated area in 1948 when land was turned over to the peasants. No less than the better known Red Star Over China, it is a classic of the revolution wrought by Mao’s Communist Party of China (CPC). The book is a very concrete, first person account. Hinton himself lived in the village of Long Bow in China at the time of land reform when the feudal estates were broken up and given to the peasants. Two of its characteristics make the book compelling. First the reader gets to know the participants, the peasants, by name and to witness their lives change forever as they take their destiny into their own hands for the first time in millennia. Second, the book begins by describing in detail what life was like before liberation. This writer is pretty much sob-resistant, but I wept several times as I read the condition of the peasants, ruthlessly exploited and degraded by the landowners in collaboration with the central government and the connivance of the Catholic “missionary” effort.

Hinton took over a thousand pages of notes and returned to the US only upon the termination of Truman’s widely despised war on Korea in 1953, which killed one million Asians and about 50,000 U.S. soldiers and contributed mightily to his defeat at the hands of Eisenhower. Hinton’s notes were promptly confiscated by customs and turned over to the notorious McCarthyite committee of Senator James Eastland. Hinton had his passport confiscated, was harassed by the FBI, blacklisted and unable to find work. He finally found land to farm which he did for a decade and a half. He finally got the release of his notes and set to work on Fanshen. No major publishing house would print it, but in 1966 Monthly Review Press, bless their Marxist souls, finally published it. In the splendid political climate of the 60s, it was a great but short lived success.

One especially stirring moment in Hinton’s account arrives when the landlords, deprived of any armed force to impose their will, take to threatening the peasants with the wrath of their ancestors. Standing before a monument to his ancestors, fearful and hesitant, one of the leading peasants finally takes a hammer to the headstone and smashes it to pieces. There is no thunderbolt from the skies, and at that moment the hold of the old exploiters was greatly weakened but not broken. The peasants remained afraid that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and their army would win and the old landlords would return; and the influence of the Catholics and their support of the old ways remained. But the peasants encouraged by the CPC cadre pushed on (Of course the threat of the displeasure of an ancestor is pretty thin gruel compared to the fire and brimstone fear that the monotheistic desert religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, provided to the West.) Here Mao’s words found expression in the deeds of the peasants:

“What should we not fear? We should not fear heaven. We should not fear ghosts. We should not fear the dead. We should not fear the bureaucrats. We should not fear the militarists. We should not fear the capitalists.”

Pretty good advice –then and now.

During land reform in Long Bow, there was no presence of the People’s Liberation Army, just a few CPC cadre and in this case Hinton. More often than not the cadre had to restrain the peasants from killing the landlords at once and often in fairly merciless ways – and the cadre were not always successful. Millenia of rage at the beatings, rapes, theft, death of loved ones and worst human degradation imaginable poured out at the rulers of old China in those days. But revolution is not a matter of serving tea, as Mao put it.

I recently returned from a short stay in China. Without Hinton’s book, an adequate perspective on what I saw would have been impossible. New China is impressive in many respects, but it arose on the ashes of old China and the suffering endured for millennia by the Chinese peasantry until the end of Chiang Kai-shek’s U.S. backed rule. In Hinton’s book Mao makes no appearance nor do other giants of the Chinese revolution, but we see the fruits of their work up close. Chairman Mao liked to say that to understand society one should look down, not up; and Fanshen does just that. Look down not up – pretty good advice and so little regarded on the contemporary “left” which is so much given to watching those on high.

Now imagine this novel being written by a collective of Italian fiction writers. Sound far-fetched? Impossible to pull off? Just plain impossible?

Let me introduce Manituana. It is a story set in the Mohawk nation in the 1770s. Joseph Brant, Mohawk war chief and his family, friends and enemies are the primary characters. The Royal Court of England and a group of London ruffians who “dress up” as Indians play supporting roles. Brant, facing threats from aggressive Indian-hating settlers intent on carving up the land of the Mohawks and other member tribes of the Iroquois Confederation and the defection of member tribes and individual members to the side of the American rebels against the Crown of England, undertakes a journey to negotiate the crown’s support for his people in return for their support against the rebels. Included in his entourage is the great warrior Philip Lacroix or Ronaterihonte, the son of Englishman William Johnson and Mohawk shaman Molly Brant, Peter Johnson, and the captured Ethan Allen, one of the first of the American rebels to attack the Confederation’s lands. After gaining the Crown’s support and witnessing the meaningless and corrupt antics of the Court, the entourage heads back to America to engage the rebels in battle on the side of London. From thereon, this is a story of war, flight, and the death and misery that accompany these phenomena.

Manituana is a true fourth world novel. It pits the original peoples of a nation against those who come to colonize it. It is the story of the multiple indigenous nations that existed on the American continent before the Europeans came and destroyed them. It is the story of India and the British Raj and it is the tale of the Algerian people and the French Republic’s colonization of that land. it is also the story of Israel and its ethnic transformation of Palestine into a Western settler state. In short, it is the tale of every people that has seen its land taken over by a European people as intent on making it their own as its original inhabitant are on preventing such an occurrence. This is also the story of America’s indigenous people being manipulated by the European colonists for the Europeans’ own ends. We see a mirror of this situation in today’s manipulations of the indigenous peoples in the lands the west wants as its own today: the Shia vs. Sunni conflict in Iraq and the manipulation of tribal conflicts in Afghanistan are but two examples that come immediately to mind. Manituana evokes the dangerous conceit of men who believe it is their destiny to rule the world.

When one considers that this novel was composed by a collective, they might hesitate. The project sounds unworkable, after all. This group of five Italian writers in Bologna who call themselves Wu Ming has written two previous novels as a collective and produced individual works, as well. Both previous novels by Wu Ming received critical acclaim and one, titled Q, reached the bestseller lists. Manituana also reached into the top ten on Italian bestseller lists. As interesting as their works, the collective currently consists of Roberto Bui (Wu Ming 1), Giovanni Cattabriga (Wu Ming 2), Federico Guglielmi (Wu Ming 4), and Riccardo Pedrini (Wu Ming 5). They consider themselves part of the New Italian Epic movement in Italian literature and come out of the politically-inclined prankster traditions of the avant-garde Luther Blisset phenomenon. Named after the first black Italian footballer, the Luther Blisset movement (if that’s what it was) ran from the mid-1990s until 1999, when its members around the world committed symbolic seppuku.

Although Wu Ming do frequent public appearances and have collaborated on films and with the Italian rock band Yo Yo Mundi on an album, they refuse to be photographed and consider the cult of the author to detract from the written word. “Once the writer becomes a face… it’s a cannibalistic jumble… A photo is witness to my absence…” they stated in a 2007 interview. “On the other hand my voice — with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations — is witness to a presence even when I’m not there…”

The first novel of a trilogy that Wu Ming is calling the Atlantic Triptych, Manituana is virtually seamless and the translation is impeccable. It defines what the booksellers mean when they list something as literary fiction. It is a quality story that includes characters of depth, a good deal of action, a consistently thoughtful context and thought-provoking concepts — all presented in a fictional form.

Ron Jacobs: Hi Sherry. To begin, can you tell the readers about the March for Equality? What is the impetus behind it? Who put out the original call?

Sherry Wolf: David Mixner, who worked as an Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LBGT) liaison in the Clinton administration and Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk’s collaborator and who launched the Names Project AIDS Quilt, put out the call for this march back in June. It was met with horror and opposition from many of the more established, corporate financed national LGBT groups. However, with momentum building at the grassroots, organizations such as Human Rights Campaign and NGLTF thankfully came on board, though they do not run the organizing efforts nor are they shaping the program. This march will not be brought to you by Miller Beer or Citibank!

The (mostly) younger activists at the forefront of mobilizing this march online and on campuses and in communities are sick of the gradualist approach that has dominated our movement for years. The single demand for full equality for all LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law really strikes a chord with activists such as myself and this new generation who find the incrementalist—state-by-state, issue-by-issue—strategy of the LGBT establishment to be a failed one.

RJ: I know that in your book Sexuality and Socialism you talk about the corporatization of the Gay Pride movement and its concurrent moving away from an identification with other disenfranchised and oppressed groups in the US. What would you say is the political identity this march hopes to put forth to the people of the United States?

SW: In a sense, the initiative for this march only underscores the ramifications of my arguments in Sexuality and Socialism. No more crumbs. Enough going hat in hand to Congress and waiting for some tweak in the laws. We want it all!

I got involved in helping to organize this march because I simply find it unendurable that gay politicians like Barney Frank are among the first to argue that demanding equality for LGBT people is the third rail of American politics. This march is about seeking, essentially, to be added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and have all of our rights respected once and for all.

We will have the NAACP’s Julian Bond, UNITE Here’s John Wilhelm, young, multiracial new activists like Aiyi’nah Ford, transgender militants and myself, an unabashed socialist, speaking at this march. Though Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper will be playing and speaking, this is not a Hollywood choreographed affair—it has a shoestring budget and will give expression to this new combative mood and anti-corporate sentiment

RJ: To me, the transformation of much of the Left of the 1960s and ’70s from universal movements into a collection of smaller groups fighting their own particular oppression and for their own piece of the American pie is a big part of why the US Left is where it’s at now — where Democrats are considered socialists. Is this phenomenon (which I consider to ultimately be the result of identity politics gone wild) present in the movement for equality? How should leftists counteract this when it appears?

SW: [The first part of your question is answered above, I believe]

I travel a great deal and speak to small and large audiences from Bellingham, WA to Gainesville, FL and I think that those old school ideas are on the wane—in particular among working-class people and those not attending elite universities. The language of Identity politics persists, in a sense, because a new culture and outlook are still embryonic. But when striking Teamsters (Latino and white, all straight) attended an event in Chicago two weeks ago where Cleve Jones spoke to 250+ people about going to the march, everyone was electrified. The workers gave solidarity to our struggle and the LGBT activists are lending solidarity to their pickets. The May Day protests in many cities this year had LGBT activists carrying rainbow flags—the contingent in Los Angeles where I was that day was very well received by immigrant families.

It’s becoming clearer to more people that the old labor slogan is true: An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

RJ: As you know, I live in North Carolina. Outside of Asheville and a few of the larger cities, there exists a quite obvious homophobia. One sees it on church message boards and bumperstickers and one hears it on the radio and so-called Christian television. This intolerance is quite obvious and, as Beth Sherouse wrote quite articulately in an article that appeared in Counterpunch on August 31, 2009, the fact of this obvious hatred and fear is one reason why LBGT equality must be recognized on a national scale. In her article, she reminds the readers of the federal role in helping end desegregation. Yet, there is another side to that story. The federal government also allowed and encouraged not only segregation, but also fought attempts to roll it back for a long time. I guess my question is — while it is important that federal legislation forbidding discrimination against persons based on their sexuality be passed, how does the equality movement see any such legislation being enforced?

SW: Beth is right and after reading her piece I made it a priority to add more Southern stops on my current speaking tour. If you look at polls one year after the Virginia v. Loving case ended laws preventing Blacks and whites from marrying in 1967, only 20 percent of whites in the U.S. supported biracial marriages. We obviously can’t wait for bigots to come around before passing equal protections for LGBT people. However, it was the ongoing organizing, teach-ins, marches, rallies and even just the posture of Blacks in this country that altered the political climate.

Today, around 80 percent of all Americans—and more than 95 percent of young people—approve of interracial marriages, according to Gallup. A climate of intolerance to anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry can be advanced by students and workers—regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. All progressives must bring these issues into organizing efforts beyond the LGBT movement—inject them into union contracts, workplace organizing, budget fightbacks, campus mobilizations and immigrant defense campaigns. After all, most LGBT people ARE workers, immigrants, Black, Brown and all these other identities as well. In other words, lesbians have to pay the rent too.

RJ: In your book you insist on the need for the LBGT rights movement to link up with other oppressed groups in the US and fight for all of these groups’ freedom. I was wondering if in your organizing work for the October 11-12 March on Washington, do you see any attempts by other organizers to expand the call to all oppressed groups? Or is there a tendency to limit the organizing to LBGT people? If so, can you explain why you think this is so?

SW: We made a conscious decision not to create a laundry list of demands, but to have one single demand for equality in all matters covered by civil law in all 50 states. The veteran activists involved, myself included, want to strike while the iron’s hot. There is a spirit of struggle among young LGBT people who came of age thinking AIDS isn’t the mass killer that it is and who are waking up after Prop 8 to the fact that our rights are completely dispensable, where they even exist. We can still be legally fired, or not hired, in most states for our sexual orientation and/or gender identities.

Arizona’s governor, for example, just ditched domestic partner benefits. Ohio’s Representative, Lynn R. Wachtmann, some neanderthal from the 75th District wrote to LGBT activists, “If sexual orientation and gender identity and expression are added as protected classes, all those who do not identify themselves in accordance with this lifestyle choice will be discriminated against.” I have never been a single-issue activist in my life — I’m a socialist after all — but at some point we must unequivocally demand an end to this crap once and for all.

I’m 44, I came of age AFTER Stonewall and before Generation Twitter, I’m from the generation nobody ever bothered to name. I’ve participated in, and in some cases helped lead or initiate divestment campaigns, antiwar, anti-police brutality, pro-abortion, pro-single-payer health care, anti-budget cuts, pro-labor fights, etc. for 26 years. There’s finally a broad fight for LGBT equality and I’d be insane not to leap in with full-force and try to help make it a success.

My greatest hope out of this march is not simply that we win our demand, but that in a poetic reversal of history other struggles take a page from our initiative and mobilize to make demands of the Obama administration. The Stonewall generation had fought for Black civil rights, women’s liberation, against the Vietnam War and, for many, alongside Cesar Chavez for farm laborers for many years before they ever mobilized for their own rights. This time around, it may be possible that through a quirk of history the LGBT struggle could lead the way for others to ratchet up a fight for genuine universal health care, jobs and an end to the wars and occupations abroad.

RJ: I love it — “the generation nobody bothered to name.” Anyhow, any insights on how the organizing is going? How can people get on board and organize in their community?

SW: The Web site for the march www.nationalequalitymarch.com has a dizzying array of downloadable materials. Go to the site, get the facts, post flyers, send out tweets, post it to Facebook, and by all means everyone should get themselves to the march if they can. Obama has shown that without mass pressure he won’t deliver what we need and want. This march punctuates a turning point of sorts for the LGBT struggle—people who miss out on this protest for civil rights will kick themselves afterwards. Don’t kick yourselves, just come.

RJ: Thanks, Sherry.

Ron Jacobs: Hi Marc, let me start with what seems to me to be an obvious question. Your newest book, Good Doctor Guillotin, is, among other things, a meditation on capital punishment. I’m guessing that your work opposing this form of punishment is part of what compelled you to write the novel. Yet, the story is about the invention of the guillotine. Can you talk about how these two sentiments (if that’s what they are) coincide and contradict each other?

Marc Estrin: It’s true that I think of this as “my death-penalty book”. As you know, Vermont has been under pressure from the feds to change its no-death-penalty stance to one conforming more to administration positions concerning capital punishment, and federal prosecutors continue to push for death as an option for federal capital crimes (crimes crossing state boundaries) tried in Vermont, trying to habituate Vermont juries to handing out death sentences, and the public to pressure the legislature to change Vermont statutes prohibiting them. I have written a reflection on a recent local capital trial which may be seen here.

Although the public seems to be less enthusiastic about the death penalty in the last two years, it is with us nevertheless (sometimes shockingly so as in the (upcoming) execution of the likely innocent Troy Davis), and the issue still needs work before we belatedly join the vast majority of nations in abolition.

How, then, to do that work? As with Skulk, my attempted end-run around the general censorship of 9/11 truth, The Good Doctor Guillotin is a reaching out beyond-the-choir of abolitionist regulars to a more general fiction reader who may not ever think about the issue. I had to think about the best way to involve such a person.

My hint was a strong reaction by several readers to the Sacco-Vanzetti chapter in Insect Dreams – that plus my own revulsion at a government planning and accomplishing the death of one of its citizens. It seems that detailed recounting of the prelude and countdown to an execution has strong, affective fascination, usually accompanied by a kind of identifying fear and horror often absent when we read reports of executions elsewhere. The end of A Tale of Two Cities is perhaps the supreme example.

That book certainly contributed to my choice of the French Revolution as a setting for an execution, but more than that was the stark theme of good intentions making things worse, humane science evolving into terror. Modern “improvements” in execution techniques — hanging to electric chair to gas to lethal injection – are motivated by far more technical and less revealing considerations, and so Guillotin’s situation was a very rich choice. He was in fact a good man turned into a monster by his ameliorations. So are many of us. But he knew it, too – which is what makes him so interesting a figure.

The downside of this choice is that the book may be mis-read as simply a historical novel about the French Revolution, ho-hum, that was a long time ago. I tried to block off that reception with the inclusion of contemporary essays in my own non-historical voice.

RJ: Similarly, this book also seems to be about the nature of revolution. One might frame the question this way: how do such good intentions — Liberte, equalite, fraternite — end up so horribly? Is it because the forces that are overthrown and have lost their privilege usually attack rather bloodily in an attempt to regain what they have lost or is it merely revenge on the part of the victors that were oppressed by the vanquished? Or is it something else?

ME: Having chosen the French Revolution as a setting, I spent six months reading everything I could about it, from many different authors. Because the story was to end with the first execution, and thus before the Terror, I might have limited my research to those years of preparation. But the beyond-the-novel question of how the hell the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen ended up with mass slaughter seemed so compelling, so contemporary, so relevant to our own murderous march through the world preaching “democracy”, that I spent much time trying to understand that shift.

I’m no historian or real scholar, but it did seem to me that much hinged on the moment when the Revolution went from fighting its external enemies – the royal armies of states threatened by the demise of royalty – to, having successfully defeated them, worrying about the less visible threat of internal ones – those citizens who may be secretly plotting to overthrow, or undermine, or even think about criticism of the Revolution or a return to parts of the past. Who can know what anyone is thinking? Therefore anyone may be a suspect. And any suspect will of course declare innocence. It therefore became life-preserving to speak in a certain way, to use certain words, to wear certain clothing – like wearing an American flag pin – in order to pass. Alertness for counter revolutionaries was high, and among those in power, especially Robespierre, turned into what most would agree as frank paranoia.

“The enemy within” – a most dangerous conception to be floating free in a society. We’ve seen many examples of its destructiveness. I’ve recently written a piece about two of them as a warning concerning the current mental attitude of many Israelis concerning Palestinians. You can see that here. One telltale symptom of this pathology is when a movement starts to “eat its own children.” The struggle between Robespierre and Danton was so rich in this regard, that at least two great artists have seized upon it: Büchner, in his play, Danton’s Death, and Andrej Wajda in his film, Danton. Both treatments, though poetic fiction, have enriched understanding of revolutionary struggle.

Another way good intentions go astray is via an instinct for hyper-protection when an individual, a movement, a revolution, or a nation feels itself particularly vulnerable. Though the event was created, and the fear cynically manipulated, the reaction to 9/11 is a good example. I treated that issue in my novel, Golem Song. The Golem — a central Jewish myth — was a huge clay figure built and given life by a 16th century magician/rabbi to protect the Jewish community in Prague from a likely pogrom. Unlike Frankenstein’s creature, the Golem was built not to understand better the mystery of life, but entirely for protective, potentially punitive purposes. But like the creature, the Golem got out of hand, destroying that not meant to be destroyed. “Golemism,” I call it. I see Golemism as the global marker of our times, hyperprotection leading to hyperdestruction.

RJ: My favorite character in the novel is the hapless Nicholas Pelletier — a man for whom everything he tries ends up badly. Although he is the man for whom the revolution was supposedly fought, he becomes the blade’s first victim. Is this end meant to be just a continuation of his bad luck or is there something deeper involved?

ME: Yes, he was the man for whom the revolution was supposedly fought, but 1) was he? And 2) what else was he?

Remember that except for the year of the Terror, the French Revolution was a bourgeoise one, led primarily by lawyers and rich merchants with the striking assistance of the progressive nobility. They were fighting not for Pelletier, but to wrest power away from the nobility and the clergy. In theory, the revolution declared “the rights of man”, but it was for bourgeois man those rights were proclaimed. Some idealists (Robespierre among them!) kept the Pelletiers in mind as they made their lengthy, highly educated speeches. Some, of course, like Marat, were all about the poor, but Marat and the Père Duchêne were rabble-rousers, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment were not about rousing rabble, but rousing consciousness. Liberty, as here and now, had its limits, equality was hardly reachable, except in theory, and fraternity had its mentally gated communities. The Masonic lodges came closest to a mixing of social levels, but one can scarcely imagine a Pelletier at a Masonic lodge.

No, Pelletier slipped into being a mauvais pauvre — part of pre-industrial class of society that was beneath consideration, beyond repair, and only to be controlled by an ever-expanding police apparatus. He began as a peasant, like most of his countrymen. But consecutive years of drought and freeze destroyed much of France’s agricultural economy, and there was no government help available because the national treasury had been looted to pay for foreign wars (most notably our own revolution, a proxy war against the real enemy, England.) Where have we heard this before? Just as Obama’s rescue packages robs the poor to enrich the rich, so did the realities of the Revolution leave the Pelletiers behind.

I like the little scene where an enlightened doctor offers him the opportunity to transform from a despised criminal to a hero of science by making his detached head wink on signal. I made up this incident up, but it does reflect a grand controversy about whether there was consciousness after decapitation, and whether, therefore the humane rationale for decapitation was warranted. Note the attention to this kind of detail, while the larger question (again raised by Robespierre and only a few others in the National Assembly) of capital punishment went by the boards. Like many things today, national health care, for instance, or stopping the wars, it was considered “not politically feasible.”

RJ: While reading the novel I found myself thinking about the nature of religious faith versus the nature of scientific thought–arguably one of the battles being fought at an intellectual level during the period the novel takes place. This conflict has a revived significance in today’s world what with the rise of religious fundamentalism from Afghanistan to Topeka, Kansas. Yet, underneath the apparent rationality of science there also seems to be an element of irrational belief required for one to take the next step and accept science’s logic. Your first book Insect Dreams touched on this in its portrayal of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. Care to comment?

ME: One of the most striking things I discovered while filling in my knowledge of the French Revolution was the central role of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in creating a counter-revolutionary backlash, especially in the western rural areas of Brittany and the Vendée. Those impassioned movements affected my choice of origin for Pelletier and his wife, and infused much of the internal conflict of the curé Pierre Grenier, the only completely invented character. His role in the novel is to illustrate precisely the anguished interactions of faith, doubt, science, revolutionary fervor, and the human heart.

Having been trained as a scientist myself, I both admire its finesse, and loathe its dismissal of the larger, if cloudier, dimensions of the lived world. The chapter, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” in Insect Dreams was my indictment of that limited world view, certainly faith-based, that science is the definitive guide to reality, and arbiter of right action. The scientists of the Manhattan Project, faced with the collapse of their raison d’être, refused to stop before testing their bomb on human beings.

This conflict, this pattern, supplies one of the continuing themes of many of my novels — the Faustian bargain: desire for knowledge and “progress” without considering the cost and consequences. Guillotin’s story is an archetype of this, our ongoing, hubristic, human tragedy.

RJ: Ah yes… the Faustian bargain. I think we’ve all made a few–at least at a personal level–to get a job or maintain a relationship. However, the ones I’m more interested in are those that we make in the political/economic realm as a people. Last November’s election appears to me as a Faustian bargain of this type. Hell, every election is a Faustian bargain of a sort. Anyhow, back to the more general one we make as residents of the United States — we know what our government, its military and the corporate/financial monoliths do to maintain our standard of living… and we support it, if only tacitly. Keeping Nicholas Pelletier in mind, one could argue that it is only the criminals and others — those that Bob Dylan called “the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked”–that do not make this bargain. But then, they probably make their own with Mephistopheles in another form. I guess my question is–can any human in our modern society avoid the Faustian deal?

ME: Faustian bargain:

Let’s make some distinctions because not every bargain is a Faustian bargain. The key dynamic in the Faustian bargain is a quest – for knowledge, or power, or the establishment of some ideal – with every attainment receiving some unexpected blowback, usually a just punishment.

I don’t think the US elections represent a Faustian bargain: we certainly don’t learn anything from them, nor do we get any power, nor do we further any ideal. Rather the opposite in each case. So I’m not even sure what “bargain” we, or Pelletier, or any of the forsaked have entered into, much less Faustian ones.

The dynamic there (here) seems to be pure submission to power and exploitation – which is largely the case with voters (excepting the power elite) in the US.

Given that understanding, I would put your question rather differently:

1. Can any human in our modern society get any kind of bargain at all – something symbiotically quid pro quo?

2. Can any human in our modern society find a Faustian bargain on the racks?

The first is a complex question, given the resources spent to create false consciousness. “If you protect me from terrorists, I will give up my civil liberties, and engage in torture.” I suppose that’s a bargain of sorts. Etc.

The second is also complex, though I suspect less so because the group under discussion is smaller. Who are the humans in modern society who are in a position to gain knowledge, power, or their ideals? The elite, who are usually less than knowledgeable about consequences, or worse, impervious to them. “I don’t really give a shit how many Indian farmers die, as long as my net worth goes up.” Well-funded scientists
often discover things, most often of use in keeping the power imbalance intact.

The Mephistophelian dimension to the Faustian Bargain indicates that what is at issue is supernatural power brought to bear on humans who can’t handle it. Given the secularization of modern society, I suppose we have to translate that into the dynamic between the “spiritual” innerworld, and the political/economic realm. Here, I think, bargains can be made, though given the economic/social cost of say, discovering that one should drop out of society, they may often lead to Faustian hell.

RJ: What about the bargains one makes when working for an employer like General Dynamics? Or the bargain one makes by reaping the benefits of that corporation being in the tax base? Or the bargain one makes to have a nice car and pretty skin? The quests involved may be pecuniary and venal, but they are quests.

ME: I think those are “bargains” similar to “I’ll trade my civil liberties (and morality) for your protection.” Bargains in quotes, but not Faustian ones.

RJ: Until next time. Onward.

In a radical free-market culture, when hope is precarious and bound to commodities and a corrupt financial system, young people are no longer at risk: they are the risk.

– Henry Giroux, p. x.

If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world, they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized… p. 29.

As the politics of the social state gives way to the biopolitics of disposability, the prison becomes a preeminently valued institution whose disciplinary practices become a model for dealing with the increasing number of young people who are considered to be the waste products of a market-mediated society. p. 82.

Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?
By Henry A. Giroux
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-230-61329-4
ISBN10: 0-230-61329-2

It need not be said, though I find it necessary to restate, that Henry Giroux is one of the most important public servants the last 100 years have produced. In his expansive three decade plus academic career, Giroux has written over 35 books, contributed to countless scholarly journals, and received numerous educational honors.

But perhaps what most makes this former high school basketball star distinct is his tireless advocacy on behalf of the frail, the vulnerable, the disposable.

Giroux has focused much of his writing over the fragile existence disenfranchised populations are largely relegated to. Giroux’s “critical sympathy” to the often forgotten, as Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson once mentioned, is what pushes him time after time to engage issues many of his peers would rather stay far away from — for fear of sanction, resentment, or job loss.

In that spirit of deep moral determination and fervent conviction, comes his latest work: Youth in a Suspect Society, which, above all else, is an attempt to interrogate the increasingly hostile future our society is preparing, with no sense of shame or irony, for its next tenants — young people.

Giroux wastes no time condemning the “assault against youth” being waged by all those blind to the radical realities of reproof youth, and especially those of color, are being confined to by way of policy and legislation. An example of this is provided in the case of Deamonte Driver, a seventh grader from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who “died because his mother did not have the health insurance to cover an $80 tooth extraction.”

Under the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, Giroux writes, there was at least a “willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them to be critical citizens.” But all advancements made in that era were rolled over as one neo-conservative administration after the other found its way into the White House. And the most devastating of them, in theory and practice, Giroux insists, was the 43rd one.

But government alone isn’t responsible, he notes, because anti-Youth legislations couldn’t be established as law without a media complex that has “habitually” reinforced representations, however false, of young people as “variously lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, volatile, dangerous, and manipulative.” It’s important to note that these suggestions “do more than degrade young people and resonate with their underlying marginality and disposability”; they also “legitimate the passage of draconian measures, policies, and laws at the highest levels of government.”

So, it then makes sense when schools become transformed into secondary stations for police officers, military personnel, and other agents of the State.

The message: Kids and, especially, Youth are a threat to society — a threat which must be watched with close scrutiny, dealt with diabolically, and, when necessary, punished with the power of the law.

Students are, as a result, targeted and treated as potential criminals, paving way for a society in which “children who commit a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell.”

In Youth in a Suspect Society, Giroux also takes special time out to dive deeper into the challenges confronting children, as they try to navigate a world where giant corporations see them as nothing but disposable commodities – to be bought and sold.

Children, Dr. Giroux writes, “constitute the primary index through which a society registers its own meaning, vision, and politics.” And today’s children are having to become more accustomed to a speed-driven society; a society that treasures punctuality over poignancy, and impatience over incandescence. Thus, kids are being encouraged to revel in “the suspension of judgment, the inability to think critically, [and] the avoidance of responsibility.” (Never mind that these very kids are still ultimately barraged with blame for low test scores or poor performance on state standardized tests.)

Kids would also have to get used to “a society that measures its success and failure solely through the economic lens of the Gross National Product (GNP)”; a society unable to “define youth outside of market principles determined largely by … market growth and the accumulation of capital.”

This society, children should be aware, sees them not only as an “expansive and profitable market but as the primary source of redemption for the future of capitalism.”

Examples of such thinking abound in Youth in a Suspect Society. Giroux’s meticulous research unearths numerous reports of kids being selected by toy companies to act as representatives (unpaid employees), such as a GIA-sponsored event, Slumber Party in a Box, which enlists “agents” to “invite their friends to an overnight party, hand out free products to them, and then provide ‘feedback through quizzes’ to GIA headquarters.” Corporations have found kids and pre-teens great resources – peer pressure power — to use in expanding their brand — even if it commodifies the non-market value of friendship.

Giroux also turns a sharp gaze on pro athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, who, he says, appear more interested in inflating their bank account figures than “using their celebrity status for educating young people about character, hard work, the value of sportsmanship, and the sheer joy of athleticism.”

But there’s another angle to this, which hasn’t gotten as much press among progressive circles. As Giroux writes:

More and more youth have been defined and understood within a war on terror that provides an expansive, antidemocratic framework for referencing how they are represented, talked about, and inserted within a growing network of disciplinary relations that responds to the problems they face by criminalizing their behaviors and subjecting them to punitive modes of conduct.

The war on terror and drugs, Giroux asserts, has added a new target: Youth.

This war, unlike the more glamorous cross-national disputes, doesn’t necessarily involve two sides in contentious combat. This war is characterized by “4th grade reading scores and graduation rates [being] used to determine how many prison cells will be built.” This war is against the growing population of “pint-size nihilists” amongst us. Extinguish them!

And so,

Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of being recognized as badly served by failing schools, they are labeled uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of being provided with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless.

These enemies of our peace are then rightfully placed in schools where the squeaking sound of metal detectors is omnipresent, where police forces are dominant, where arrests, suspensions, and expulsions are as commonplace as being frisked, cussed-out, or strip-searched by security officers on your way to class. These enemies of our peace might be too young to legally “marry, drive a car, get a tattoo, or go to scary movies, but not too young to be put in prisons for the rest of their lives.”

And while we’re at it, let’s make sure they’re excluded from “various forms of student aid,” post-conviction, including but not limited to “welfare payments, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, and… public housing.”

Isn’t it so heartwarming to know that young people growing up have such a splendid future awaiting them?

Giroux calls on “intellectuals” of great courage to “take a stand” against these “collective problems” putting at risk “not only young people and adults… but the very possibility of deepening and expanding democracy itself.” But how many of these intellectuals wouldn’t have to be summoned from the dead?

As he rightly notes, the university has witnessed a radical shift in vision this past decade. Through hysteria whipped up by right-wingers following 9/11, many liberal or left-leaning professors have been silenced or fired to quell the paranoia expressed by some students that they’re being brainwashed. Their professors tried to force upon them “Marxist” and “Socialist” values – values that go by such scary prospects as critical thinking, intellectual freedom, and independent reasoning.

These young people, Giroux writes, have been bamboozled by the likes of David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of popular culture, who’ve “hijacked political power and waged a focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing the quality of education made available to youth in the name of patriotic correctness.”

Cheated out of an enlightening educational experience, Giroux contends, are young people, who, in exchange for being provided the tools to “critically engage what they know and to recognize the limits of their own knowledge,” are infantilized by appeasing academics. They are denied “opportunities to engage knowledge critically… [and] assume responsibility for what it means to know something.”

Giroux’s hopes are for a “larger public dialogue about how to imagine a democratic future,” in the context of a Youth-centered pedagogy. Unfortunately, “We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of color, offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance.” Nonetheless, this ambassador of hope reassures: “… [P]ower as a form of domination is never absolute, and oppression always produces some form of resistance.”

And though the laborious work of resistance must engage all sectors of society, Giroux’s call to young people is direct: “[G]o out into the world and actively try to change it.”

Youth in a Suspect Society is an unnerving prophetic call to action. Through tedious research and meditation, Giroux has provided a blueprint that all concerned can use in restoring the faith Youth once had in society — faith planted in the soils of non-privatized, non-corporatized values.

This faith, however, has been uprooted by years of indifference and antipathy, callousness and bellicosity.

Children are now much too aware of the degree of disregard society disses them with. And they respond to it in ways that anger some and amuse others.

But the concrete work of restoring this faith has hardly been addressed, let alone acted upon, before the publication of Youth in a Suspect Society.

I recommend it with inestimable gratitude to Dr. Giroux for his moral vigor and matchless vitality.

If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was “highly objectionable”. His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were “outrageous and disgusting”. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “angry and repulsed”, while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images “deeply upsetting.” Miliband warned: “How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.”¹

Ah yes, “the civilized community of nations”, that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward.² No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an “accident”. Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today’s oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi’s innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he’s innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi’s trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case.³ The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non — loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport — for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.”⁴

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany — guaranteed, sworn to, scout’s honor, case closed — until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya — the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq — that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite.⁵

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. “If he goes back to Libya,” Swire says, “it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. … I’ve lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive.”⁶

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: “American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.” Added the Times: “The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was ‘no current credible intelligence’ implicating her.”⁷

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it’s highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya’s guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take “responsibility” for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

Humankind shall never fly

All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are “socialist”. (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with “Socialism” in large letters, as the only word.⁸ ) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol’ capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans — like most of their countrymen — might be rather surprised to discover that they don’t really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled “The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?”

A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can’t do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than 80 percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W. Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs.⁹ Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction — putting the outside contractors in the best light.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.

The continual selling of the Afghanistan war

“But we must never forget,” said President Obama recently, “this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”¹⁰

Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It’s simple — We’re fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We’re fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Never mind that the “plot to kill Americans” in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

As to “plotting to do so again” … there’s no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda.

There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn’t have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn’t even have to be such a thing as a “member of al Qaeda”. It tells us nothing that some of them can be called “al Qaeda”. Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

In any event, as in Iraq, the American “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon.

The only “necessity” that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire?

But the war against the Taliban can’t be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out.

The revolution was televised

   You will not be able to stay home, brother.
   You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
   You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
   Because the revolution will not be televised. …

   There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
   The revolution will not be right back after a message
   The revolution will not go better with Coke
   The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
   The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as ‘60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution”.

Fast Forward to 2009 … Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution.¹¹

Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

Yugoslavia

During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence.

– David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

There’s no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs’ new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities.

1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009.
2. Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992.
3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009.
4. ”Opinion of the Court”, Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001.
5. Read many further details about the case.
6. The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009.
7. Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009.
8. Washington Post, August 6, 2009, p.C2.
9. Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned.
10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17, 2009.
11. Washington Post, August 26, 2009.

The campaign is especially strong on university campuses where many voices have been raised in support of human rights for the Palestinians.

One such example is the attempt to suppress the Public Interest Research Group, founded by Ralph Nader, at the University of Ottawa for their support for Palestinian human rights.

Similar anti-Palestinian campaigns have occurred at many universities in Canada including the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario and York University.

An attack against a student group that was sympathetic to the Palestinians occurred at the University of Western Ontario in 1982. The student group was refused official recognition because of its support for the Palestinians and for sponsoring Palestinian and Arab speakers. After this refusal a complaint was made to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

After a long battle, and with the support of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and its General Counsel Alan Borovoy, and a supportive editorial in The Globe & Mail, the Ontario Human Rights Commission compelled the University Students Council at the University of Western Ontario to issue a statement of regret and to ratify the student group. The refusal was deemed discriminatory against Palestinians and persons associated with Palestinians.¹

Despite this successful legal precedent at Western Ontario there have been many attacks against individuals and groups across Canada and the United States because of their support for human rights for Palestinians. Over the last few years there is a concerted attempt to suppress discussion of the Palestinian issue in North America.

There also is a campaign to punish those individuals who have spoken out in support of the Palestinians by cutting funding and by denying them tenure and even getting them terminated from their positions of employment.

Two well-known examples of firings are the campaigns that targeted Jewish professors’ Norman Finkelstein (author of many books on Israel and Zionism including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict (Verso Press, New York, 1995) and Joel Kovel (author of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (Pluto Press: London, 2007)) for their attacks on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

Another tactic is to smear such individuals who have supported the Palestinians with allegations of anti-Semitism. One such individual was Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu. A few complaints from the Jewish community led to the Noble Prize winner being banned from speaking on campus by the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Tutu was attacked because of statements he made criticizing Israeli policy toward the Palestinians that some Jewish individuals said were “anti Semitic.”

Marv Davidov, an adjunct professor with the Justice and Peace Studies program at the University of St. Thomas said:

As a Jew who experienced real anti-Semitism as a child, I’m deeply disturbed that a man like Tutu could be labeled anti-Semitic and silenced like this,…

I deeply resent the Israeli lobby trying to silence any criticism of its policy. It does a great disservice to Israel and to all Jews.

After provoking a strong backlash against the decision, and a campaign lead by Jewish Voice for Peace in support of the Arch Bishop which produced more than 6,000 letters of protest, the University rescinded the ban.

Professor Bill Robinson was also a target of a similar campaign about alleged anti Semitism to get him fired at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Ultimately the University administration defended Robinson’s academic freedom and the right to express his opinions in his global politics class. Robinson, who is Jewish, distributed an email prepared by a pro-Palestinian Jewish activist that compared the Israeli attack on Gaza to the Nazi attack on the Warsaw Ghetto. In response to this attack on Professor Robinson, more than 100 UCSB faculty members signed a petition asking the university to dismiss the charges against him. In addition, 16 university department chairs wrote letters to the University authorities asking them to dismiss the case against Robinson.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, one of the founders of Independent Jewish Voices in Britain, also used his position as a Member of Parliament in London, England to criticize Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Members of Kaufman’s family perished at the hands of the Nazis and in the Holocaust. As one of the U.K.’s harshest critics of Israeli policies, Kaufman routinely compared the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.²

This campaign to silence critics of Israel and to demonize supporters of the Palestinians is most disturbing and a violation of free speech, academic freedom and violation of Palestinian human rights.

It is also a violation of basic democratic rights when a government does it. For example, the recent cuts to the Canadian Arab Federation’s funding by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. The punitive action taken by Minister Kenney is a denial of the fundamental freedoms and rights which are guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Charter guarantees the right of free speech and freedom of conscience and protects the individual and organizations from government sanction.

This campaign is also an attack on the numerous dissenting Jews who support human rights for the Palestinians.

Canadian Jewish groups like Not in Our Name (NION) and Jewish Independent Voices (Canada) and their support for the Palestinians and their criticism of the “Jewish State” are simply ignored. For political purposes, they simply do not exist.

The mainstream media also rarely covers these alternative Jewish perspectives. However, there are rare exceptions and sometimes views critical of Zionism are published in the mainstream North American press. Here is one notable example:

“It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with “the concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept.” For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to “push the hand of God”; and Marxist Jews — my grandparents among them — tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered.

Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else’s. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel’s actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse.

The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.”³)

Most of the rest of the World has a much more critical view of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and supports the right of Palestinians to self determination.

For example in one vote at the United Nations, held on December 19, 2006 on the Israeli Palestinian issue, the tally was 176 to five in favor of the Palestinians.

The countries that supported Israel were the United States, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Micronesia.

Five countries abstained. They were: Australia, Canada, Central African Republic, Nauru and Vanuatu.

The entire rest of the World voted in favor of the right of Palestinians to self-determination. However, to read the mainstream North American press you almost never hear of these one-sided votes.

All human beings are entitled to basic human rights. However, the well documented human rights violations of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, by respected organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The International Red Cross, the United Nations, and even by Israeli organizations such as B’Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and by many Israeli journalists, are attacked and buried under a barrage of criticism that they are biased, are unfair for singling out the Jewish State or are even anti-Semitic.

My own record as a lawyer representing refugee claims for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories made against Israel, is 28 positives to one negative or a 96.5% success rate.

However, in the eyes of the supporters of Israel this does not mean that there are serious human rights problems in the Occupied Territories.

Israel can do no wrong. It is the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada that is “anti-Semitic” and the Jewish members of the IRB who rendered positive decisions on Palestinian refugee claims made against Israel are “self-hating Jews.”

A Palestinian is simply an inhabitant or citizen of Palestine. There are Jewish, Christian, Muslim and non-believers who are Palestinian. The indigenous Palestinian Jews were opposed to the European Jewish settlers who were flooding into Palestine with the support of Great Britain. A Palestinian is simply a national designation like that of being Canadian or American.

There is no racial, ethnic or religious criteria for being a Palestinian. Only by right of birth, naturalization and descent that one becomes a Palestinian, just like in most other countries.

The Jewish State’s citizenship and Immigration process are unique in the World. To qualify as a “Jew” in “the Jewish state” one must meet a racial or ethnic criteria or in the alternative, a religious criterion.

The Jewish Law of Return grants almost immediate citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the World. Palestinians who were born in the country and forcibly expelled are, for the most part, forbidden to return.

The Zionist state of Israel defines itself as “Jewish” and structures itself to advance the interests of Jews at the expense of non-Jews and especially against the indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinian population.

In March 1919 United States Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to President Woodrow Wilson as he was departing for the Paris Peace Conference.

The petition was signed by 31 prominent American Jews. The signatories included Henry Morgenthau, Sr., ex-ambassador to Turkey; Simon W. Rosendale, ex-attorney general of New York; Mayor L. H. Kampner of Galveston, Texas; E. M. Baker, from Cleveland and president of the Stock Exchange; R. H. Macy’s Jesse I. Straus; New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs; and Judge M. C. Sloss of San Francisco. Part of the petition read:

…we protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World’s Peace Conference to establish. Whether the Jews be regarded as a “race” or as a “religion,” it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.

There is much controversy over what is Zionism and how to define the “Jewish State.” As Akiva Orr writes,

The Zionist movement and its State- ISRAEL, do not represent the Jewish people. They never did.

They represent a particular trend within the Jewish people, namely- the nationalist trend. To find out whether Israel is a Jewish State or a Zionist State one need only ask any religious Orthodox Jew anywhere. His answer will be unambiguous: a Jewish State must be ruled by Jewish religious law- “ Halakha”. Israel is not ruled by “Halakha” laws, but by secular laws. Therefore Israel is not a Jewish State. The fact that it provides refuge to Jews does not make it a Jewish State . . . Zionism and Judaism are different entities. They have contradictory qualities.⁴

The argument is often made that criticism of Israel, or more appropriately the self described “Jewish State,” the meaning of which is not defined, is anti-Semitic. The fact that many Jews have criticized Israel and Zionism is deemed irrelevant. These Jewish critics are attacked as “self-hating Jews.”

There is no rational basis for the argument that criticism of the State of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is anti-Semitic. The logic for this view is obviously flawed.

For example it makes no sense to accuse an individual who criticizes Apartheid South Africa’s racist policies toward the blacks as evidence of racism toward Whites.

Or that criticism of the Nazi policy toward the Jews should not be allowed because it is evidence of racism against Germans.

Similarly, if you criticize American policy toward the Iraq war and torture at Abu Ghraib Prison or the Jim Crow laws that institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the southern states, then you are racist against Americans. This argument is obviously absurd and should not even need a response.

To quote one American Jewish academic on the comparison of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the racist Jim Crow laws in the United States: “I grew up as a white girl in the Jim Crow South and I have spent my adult life in the study of racism; what I see when I go to Palestine is Jim Crow on steroids.”⁵

It is a basic right to evaluate and to criticize a political ideology or political movement and to review and even criticize a state’s policies.

The argument should be evaluated on the merits and the truthfulness of the facts presented. It is also a right to present alternative facts and to have a debate.

However, when one side wants to avoid debate, divert the discussion or suppress the topic and launches personal attacks against their opponents, it is almost a certain proof that they are hiding some uncomfortable truths.

Dr. Joel Beinin in an article, “Silencing critics not way to Middle East peace,” published in the San Francisco Chronicle, on February 4, 2007, discussed the campaign to silence critics of Israeli policy.

Beinin is a professor of History at Stanford University and is Jewish. He is active with Jewish Voice for Peace. Here is what Beinin had to say about the campaign to attack critics of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

“Why discredit, defame and silence those with opposing viewpoints? I believe it is because the Zionist lobby knows it cannot win based on facts.

An honest discussion can only lead to one conclusion: The status quo in which Israel declares it alone has rights and intends to impose its will on the weaker Palestinians, stripping them permanently of their land, resources and rights, cannot lead to a lasting peace.

We need an open debate and the freedom to discuss uncomfortable facts and explore the full range of policy options. Only then can we adopt a foreign policy that serves American interests and one that could actually bring a just peace to Palestinians and Israelis.”

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as well as the massacres, rapes and illegal confiscation of Palestinian property, is well documented by Israeli historians. These include Simcha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Benny Morris, The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-1949, (Cambridge University Press: New York, 1987); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins, (Olive Branch Press: New York, 1993); and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oneworld Publications: Oxford, 2006).

There are many more Israeli authorities that confirm the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1947-1949 and again in 1967. In fact it is still going on today in what some Israelis call the “slow motion ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians.⁶

If the Palestinians, or their supporters, complain about the well-documented facts surrounding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, losing their property to which they had legal title to, losing their personal belongings and even their bank accounts, having 531 villages destroyed, losing their country and their right to a citizenship, and then not being allowed to return to their homes in contravention of international law; or complain about discriminatory policies of the Jewish National Fund or the discrimination involved in the Jewish Law of Return; or complain about the house demolitions, the more than 600 Israeli military check points in the West Bank, the 42 years of military Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the program of targeted assassinations, the well-documented cases of torture; and the imprisonment of more than 11,000 Palestinians including women and children, many held without charge under what is called Administrative Detention, or the recent slaughter in Gaza, that these complaints and to expose these facts is anti-Semitic!

The view that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, or its actions, is pure and simple racism against Palestinians. The Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims have many legitimate reasons to criticize the policies and actions of “the Jewish State.” A state that aggressively, and repeatedly, attacks its neighbours and is slowly but systematically ethnically cleansing its non-Jewish population is not above criticism.

No state is above criticism. You should be very afraid of a political ideology that you must accept without question.

There is also much to criticize in the Arab world but it would be absurd to say that one cannot criticize the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for its treatment of women or its human rights record, because it is racist against Arabs or is anti-Muslim. A person who made such an argument would be laughed at. No one would take them or the argument seriously.

Yet this allegation of anti-Semitism is a frequent smear tactic that has been used against individuals who have publicly supported Palestinian human rights.

These individuals include former US President Jimmy Carter, Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, Arnold Toynbee, George Orwell and many, many others who have expressed public support for the Palestinians. Most of the strongest critics of Zionism and Israel’s policies are Jewish.

The only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet when Great Britain first threw its weight behind Zionism in 1917, Sir Edwin Montagu, was adamantly opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. He attacked the Balfour Declaration and Zionism because he believed they were anti-Semitic. Montagu argued that Zionism and anti-Semitism were based on the same premise, namely that Jews and non-Jews could not co-exist.

Ironically, people like me who want Jews to remain in our society, be an important part of our community and be safe from discrimination and racism are diametrically opposed to the Zionist goal of ingathering all of the Jews to Palestine.

Zionists want to “save the Jews” because they are not safe in the diaspora and face the threat of persecution due to the intractable anti-Semitism that exists in non-Jewish societies. To quote one Zionist commentator,

The Law [of Return] and the Clause and, for that matter Zionism and the Jewish State are necessary so long as the threat to our people continues; so long, in other words, as Diaspora exists…..So the Law of Return continues to be necessary for Jewish survival, to serve its essential function in Zionist theory and practice. The Law defines Israel’s Zionist mission, our state as protector and refuge for threatened Diaspora Jewry.⁷

Without the history of Christian anti-Semitism that has existed in Europe and the centuries of persecution of the European Jewish community political Zionism would be considered a deranged and absurd political philosophy. Without anti-Semitism, Zionism has no legitimacy.

Sir Edwin Montagu was also afraid that a Jewish state would undermine the safety of Jews in other countries. It appears that this fear was realized in that the safety of the Arab Jewish community was undermined, to a large extent deliberately, so that they would be forced to immigrate to Palestine to strengthen the Jewish presence there.

Montagu’s opposition to Zionism and the Balfour Declaration was supported by the leading representative bodies of Anglo-Jewry at the time, the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, and in particular, by three prominent British Jews Claude Montefiore, David Alexander and Lucien Wolf.

Many Jews are anti-Zionist and opposed the settlement of Jews in Palestine.

In fact, historically Zionism was not supported by the majority of Jews. In the process of creating the state of Israel the political Zionists destroyed Palestine and ethnically cleansed more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages in order to create a demographic Jewish majority in their newly created “Jewish state.”

There is a very respected and honored Jewish tradition of opposition to injustice and human rights violations. There is no monolithic position for Jews when it comes to Israel and the Palestinian issue.

My article “Jewish Criticism of Zionism” which lists more than 160 Jewish critics of Zionism. This article lists many prominent Jewish intellectuals that are extremely critical of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. There is a long distinguished line of Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

This list includes Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Isaac Asimov, I.F. Stone, Norton Mezvinsky, Alfred Lilienthal, Silvain Levi, Eric Rouleau, Tony Judt, Sara Roy, Ronnie Kasrils, Eric Hobsbawn, Saul Landau, Noam Chomsky, Hans Kohen, Eric Fromm, Bruno Kreisky, Pierre Mendes France, Richard Falk, Harold Pinter (the Nobel prize winner for Literature), Philip Roth, Michael Selzer, Don Peretz, Immanuel Wallerstein, Rabbi Michael Lerner, actor Ed Asner and many other leading Jewish intellectuals and religious figures.

Isaac Asimov was one of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century and wrote on many topics. He expressed his views about Zionism in a number of pieces. One example is found in the second volume of his autobiography In Joy Still Felt. There he tells of having dinner in 1959 with some friends and his wife. Asimov wrote:

As usual, I found myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist and of not particularly valuing my Jewish heritage…. I just think it is more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

Asimov also commented on Zionism in a chapter titled “Anti-Semitism” in I. Asimov, his third autobiographical volume.

There, Asimov discussed how he was distressed by the capability of the historically oppressed (such as the Jews) to in turn become oppressors if given the chance.

Asimov wrote: “Right now, there is an influx of Soviet Jews into Israel. They are fleeing because they expect religious persecution. Yet at the instant their feet touched Israeli soil, they became extreme Israeli nationalists with no pity for the Palestinians. From persecuted to persecutors in the blinking of an eye.”

Tens of thousands of religious Jews today are adamantly opposed to Zionism including the orthodox Neturei Karta and the Satmar sects. Rabbi Yisroel Weiss is the international spokesman for Neturei Karta. Hundreds of thousands of religious Jews in Israel reject the secular political movement of Zionism which created “the Jewish State.”

There is an important book written by Dr. Yakov M. Rabkin, a professor of History at the University of Montreal. It is titled A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, (Zed Books: London, 2006). This book examines Jewish religious opposition to Zionism and details the long history of religious opposition to Zionism as a political movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rabkin describes present day Jewish religious anti-Zionism as follows:

… the rejection of Zionism in the name of the Torah, in the name of Jewish tradition. Such rejection is all the more significant in that it can in no way be described as anti-Semitic, recent attempts to conflate any expression of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism notwithstanding.

At first glance this seems to be a paradox.

After all, the public almost automatically associates Jews and Israel. The press continues to refer to “the Jewish State.” Israeli politicians often speak “in the name of the Jewish people.”

Yet the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel has caused one of the greatest schisms in Jewish history.

An overwhelming majority of those who defend and interpret the traditions of Judaism have, from the beginning, opposed what was to become a vision for a new society, a new concept of being Jewish, a program of massive immigration to the Holy land and the use of force to establish political hegemony there.⁸

Israel’s founders were in fact atheists who wanted to transform Judaism from being a religion into a secular national movement based on race or ethnicity. This explains why Jewish religious leaders were strongly opposed to secular Zionism. Theodore Herzl was seen as an anti-Semite due to his hostility to religious Jews.

In 1943, a group of 92 Reform rabbis, and many other prominent American Jews, created the American Council for Judaism with the express intent of combating Zionism.

Included in the Council’s leadership were Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore; Lessing J. Rosenwald, the former chairman of the Sears, Roebuck & Company, who became president of the Council; Rabbi Elmer Berger who became its executive director; Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times; and Sidney Wallach of the American Jewish Committee.

An example of their views on Zionism is Palestine, a pamphlet published by the American Council for Judaism, 1944, p.7 [American Council for Judaism Records (1942-1968), American Jewish Archives. Cincinnati, OH] which stated as follows: “… the concept of a theocratic state is long past. It is an anachronism. The concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept — is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful global war in which we are involved.”

The American Council for Judaism was founded to expressly oppose Zionism.

It was created in response to a 1942 Zionist Conference in the US, which proposed the formation of a Jewish army in Palestine before the state was founded.

The Council send letters to various governments and officials expressing their objection to such a notion as a ‘religious’ state, especially since they believed that: “that Jewish nationalism tends to confuse our fellowman about our place and function in society and diverts our own attention from our historic role to live as a religious community wherever we may dwell.”⁹

Membership in the Council grew to more than 15,000. Its members were highly articulate and greatly angered the Zionist leadership, who wanted the American Jewish community to present a united front on the Palestine question.

The book Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism 1942-1948, by Thomas A. Kolsky, (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990) is a history of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism during the period just before the creation of the “Jewish State.”

After Israel’s spectacular success in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, however, a change in the policy towards Zionism occurred in the American Council for Judaism.

Anti-Zionist Jewish author Alfred Lilienthal has suggested that “Zionist infiltration” succeeded in “neutralizing” the Council. A separate organization was subsequently established in 1969 called American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ).

The new group, which was based in New York, continued the original anti-Zionist tradition of the American Council for Judaism. Rabbi Elmer Berger served as president of AJAZ and also editor of its publication the AJAZ Report until shortly before his death in 1996.

The American Council for Judaism is still in existence but has softened its strict anti-Zionist position but today it is non-Zionist and highly critical of the “Jewish State’s” policies toward the Palestinians.

Their publications frequently carry anti-Zionist Jewish criticism. Allan C. Brownfeld is the Editor of Issues, their quarterly newsletter and also editor of their Special Interest Report. Stephen L. Naman is President of the Council.

Adam Shatz, the literary editor of The Nation magazine, has edited a book titled Prophet’s Outcast. The book contains essays written by 24 prominent Jewish scholars and intellectuals which are very critical of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.¹⁰

Another important book is The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin. It contains articles very critical of Israel’s policies, written by 27 prominent Israelis.

The Forward was written by a prominent Israeli author and journalist Tom Segev. The Introduction is written by Anthony Lewis, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who worked at The New York Times between 1969 and 2001. Lewis is now the James Madison Visiting Professor at Columbia University.

There are many Israeli critics of Zionism and anti-Zionist Jews in Israel where the conflict with the Palestinians is most apparent. These include Avraham Burg, former head of the World Jewish Agency and former Speaker of the Knesset; Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education; Yossi Sarid a former Knesset member and past leader of Meretz; Uri Avnery former Knesset member and leader of Gush Shalom; the late Israel Shahak former Chair of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights; former General and Knessett Member Mattityahu Peled; Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem; Jeff Halper head of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions; Felica Langer, a well known human rights lawyer; Michael Warschawski, co-founder of the Alternative Information Center; University of Oxford historian Avi Shalim; Eitan Bronstein Chair of Zochrot, which means “Remember,” and works to remind Israelis about the Nakba or Palestinian catastrophe; the late linguist and journalist Tanya Reinhart; New Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe; Uri Davis, author of Israel: An Apartheid State (London: Zed Books, 1987); Tikva Honig-Parnass, editor of Between the Lines; and journalists Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, A.B. Yehoshua, Yitzhak Laor, Akiva Eldar, Meron Rapoport, B. Michael, and Gideon Spiro to name only a few of the many Israelis who are anti-Zionist, non-Zionist or extremely critical of Zionism and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

There was an interesting book review published in Haaretz, on February 29, 2008, written by Tom Segev. It was a review of a book titled, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (published by Resling in Hebrew). It is authored by Israeli historian Shlomo Zand (also spelled Sand). Prof. Zand teaches history at Tel Aviv University. The book became a best seller in Israel. Segev writes:

… in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened — hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It’s all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.

This information and arguments have been around for a long time but it is interesting to see them published in one of Israel’s leading daily newspapers and presented in a book written by an Israeli historian. Here is how Segev summarizes the arguments in Zand’s book:

According to Zand, the Romans did not generally exile whole nations, and most of the Jews were permitted to remain in the country. The number of those exiled was at most tens of thousands. When the country was conquered by the Arabs, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.

If the majority of the Jews were not exiled, how is it that so many of them reached almost every country on earth? Zand says they emigrated of their own volition or, if they were among those exiled to Babylon, remained there because they chose to. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jewish religion tried to induce members of other faiths to become Jews, which explains how there came to be millions of Jews in the world. As the Book of Esther, for example, notes, “And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them.”

Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become Jews.

The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.

We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers.

According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.¹¹

It is somewhat ironic that issues and subjects that relate to the Palestinians and Zionism that are virtually taboo in North America are openly discussed in Israel.

These same subjects are much more openly discussed in Europe and in the rest of the World.¹²

Here is what noted financier, George Soros, writing in the New York Review of Books, on April 12, 2007, had to say on this the lack of debate in the United States on the Palestinian issue:

The current policy is not even questioned in the United States. While other problem areas of the Middle East are freely discussed, criticism of our policies toward Israel is very muted indeed. The debate in Israel about Israeli policy is much more open and vigorous than in the United States. This is all the more remarkable because Palestine is the issue that more than any other currently divides the United States from Europe.

The Jerusalem Post wrote:

… For an example of the type of discussion that goes on in Israel is the following statement made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: “For sixty years there has been discrimination against Arabs in Israel. This discrimination is deep-seated and intolerable.” Olmert made this statement while addressing a meeting of the Knesset committee that was investigating the lack of integration of Arab citizens in public service.¹³

Another example is the current Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin (from the right-wing Likud Party) who called for a fundamental change in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. He urged the founding of a “true partnership” between the two sectors, based on mutual respect, absolute equality and the addressing of “the special needs and unique character of each of the sides.”

The Speaker was reported to say all this in an address to be delivered at the president’s residence in Jerusalem on August 3rd, 2009. Quoting from Rivlin’s prepared speech which was released to the media:

The establishment of Israel was accompanied by much pain and suffering and a real trauma for the Palestinians (in large part due to the shortsightedness of the Palestinian leadership). Many of Israel’s Arabs, which see themselves as part of the Palestinian population, feel the pain of their brothers across the green line – a pain they feel the state of Israel is responsible for.

Many of them,” Rivlin says, “encounter racism and arrogance from Israel’s Jews; the inequality in the allocation of state funds also does not contribute to any extra love.¹⁴

Can you ever imagine a top American or Canadian politician making statements like these, or a leading Canadian or American newspaper publishing an article like this one? If they did make statements like these what would be the reaction?

However, Rivlin still tried to focus the blame on the Palestinian leadership for the problems and does not fully acknowledge Israel’s part in the expulsions. These expulsions and massacres started before the official declaration of Israel’s Independence on May 14, 1948. According to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe, there were expulsions of the Palestinians from 30 villages after the War had ended in 1949.

Rivlin also does not address the land seizures from Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes but remained in Israel.

These individuals were considered Israeli citizens, but still lost all of their property. These individuals are called “present Absentees,” an Orwellian phrase if there ever was one.

Here is how one Israeli academic, Gabriel Piterberg, describes the phrase and how it relates to Israel: “How the founding myths of Israel dictated conceptual removal of Palestinians, during and after physical removal. The invention of ‘retroactive transfer’ and ‘present absentees’ as the glacial euphemisms of ethnic cleansing.”¹⁵

Nor does Rivlin acknowledge that most of the Zionist leadership wanted all of Palestine without its Arab population and this wish “miraculously” came true. Palestinian leadership, inept as it was, cannot be blamed for everything.

Another important book on this topic is Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives published by the Jewish Voice for Peace. It contains articles written by eight Jewish American writers. One of the articles is written by Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkley.

Her article is on the question of whether criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Her answer and article is titled: “No, Its Not Anti-Semitic.”¹⁶

Another book that examines Jewish criticism of Zionism and Israel’s policies is Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon (Grove Press: New York, 2003).

Kushner is an award winning playwright and Solomon a staff writer at The Village Voice and a professor at Baruch College-City of New York. This book contains a collection of 53 prominent American Jewish writers’ critical analysis of Zionism and Israel’s policies. This list includes such distinguished writers as Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Marc Ellis, Naomi Klein (actually a Canadian) and Rabbi Arthur Waskow among many others.

Another important book on Jewish criticism of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (Verso: London, 2008). It is edited by four prominent British academics, Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum. This book contains the highly critical writings of 27 Jewish academics and thinkers on the issues of the Occupation, Israel and Zionism.

There are a number of other anthologies and collections of writings from anti-Zionist Jews. These include Zionism Reconsidered, edited by Michael Selzer, (The MacMillian Company: London, 1970); Zionism: The dream and the reality: A Jewish Critique, Gary V. Smith ed. (Barnes & Noble Books: New York, 1974); Jewish Critics of Zionism and The Stifling and Smearing of a Dissenter, by Moshe Menuhin, (Association of Arab University Graduates, 1976); Judaism or Zionism, EAFORD & AJAZ (American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism) eds., (Zed Books: London, 1986); The End of Zionism and the Liberation of the Jewish People, Eibie Weizfeld ed. (Clarity Press: Atlanta, 1989); Radicals, Rabbis, and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jews against the occupation, edited by Seth Faber (Common Courage Press, Monroe ME, 2005).

Faber’s book contains a series of interviews with leading American dissident Jews’ Noam Chomsky, Steve Quester, Joel Kovel, Norton Mezvinsky, Ora Wise, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis, Adam Shapiro, Daniel Boyarin, Rabbi David Weiss, and includes a speech and an essay by Marc Ellis.

Mordecai Richler, the late esteemed Canadian author, wrote an article entitled “Israel marks 50th anniversary out of favor with many Jews,” Toronto Star, February 15, 1998. Many other Canadian Jews are opposed to Zionism or are critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Many Canadian Jews were against the war on Gaza. These dissenters include academics and writers Judy Rebick, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Rick Salutin, Bernard Avishai, Howard Skutel, Yakov Rabkin, Klaus Herrmann, Janet Weinroth, Judith Weisman, Michael Neumann, Alan Sears, Gabor Mate, Judy and Larry Haiven, Michael Mandel, Ursula Franklin, Abbie Bakan, Mordecai Briemberg, Eibie Weizfeld, Zalman Amit, Rabbi Reuben Slonim, pianist Anton Kuerti, Ralph Benmergui broadcaster and producer and Judy Deutsch head of Science for Peace to name but a few.

The Jewish Outlook Society, headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, publishes Outlook. They describe their magazine as, “An Independent, secular Jewish publication with a socialist-humanist perspective.” Carl Rosenberg is the Editor and Sylvia Friedman is the Managing Editor. Harold Berson is in charge of circulation. They have over 40 Jewish individuals, primarily living in Canada, who serve in various capacities with the organization and their publication.

Outlook takes a critical view of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and frequently publishes Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives.

Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) (Canada) currently has more than 100 members. Dylan Penner, Sid Shniad and Diana Ralph serves as coordinators for IJV. The Steering Committee is composed of 24 Canadian Jewish activists including Fabienne Presentey, Sandra Ruch, Andy Leher and Harry Shannon. The IJV is a member-led organization, with chapters in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax.

Here is what Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) said, in their February 19, 2009 Press Release, about Stephen Harper Conservative government’s position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Minister Jason Kenney’s cutting off funding for English Second Language training programs run by the Canadian Arab Federation:

We believe that Mr. Kenny [sic] and his Conservative government is threatening CAF’s funding because CAF stands for justice for Palestinian people and because it expresses principled criticism of oppressive Israeli policies.

As Jews, we affirm that criticizing Israeli policies is NOT anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism refers to hostility and/or prejudice against Jews. Like any other government, Israel has obligations under international law.

To responsibly raise critical concerns about the discriminatory, illegal, and brutal policies of another government is an ethical imperative, which our government should support.

However, the Conservative government has gone further than any previous Canadian administration in endorsing illegal and brutal Israeli assaults on Palestinian and Lebanese people.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged complete allegiance with Israel and labels as “anti-Semitic” any criticism of Israeli actions (including the Gaza massacre, house demolitions, use of illegal phosphorous and DIME weapons against civilians, etc.).

As Jews, we believe this is a dishonest smoke-screen, a ploy to discredit principled calls for humanity, justice, and compliance with international law.

There are hundreds, and probably thousands, of Jewish critics of Zionism and of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians who have published articles or written books on the subject. Yet many Zionists, and their supporters, claim that there is a monolithic Jewish position in support of Zionism, Israel and the occupation of Palestinian land.

This claim of near universal Jewish support for the Zionist state and its actions toward the Palestinians is so far from the truth that it is laughable.

One has only to open your eyes and review the written record to see that there is no Jewish consensus on these issues and a great deal of criticism and outright opposition to Zionism exists in Jewish intellectual and religious circles, both in the past and today.

Israel’s supporters shamelessly use the argument that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic no matter what Israel does. This argument is almost entirely false and politically motivated. Not to tell the truth, or to suppress discussion, about what is going on in Palestine is racist and a crime against the Palestinian people and a crime of silence and indifference not unlike the one committed against Jews in the Second World War.

To quote George Soros on the use of anti-Semitism, a tactic he described “the most insidious argument,” to silence the political debate on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

… Any politician who dares to expose AIPAC’s influence would incur its wrath; so very few can be expected to do so. It is up to the American Jewish community itself to rein in the organization that claims to represent it.

But this is not possible without first disposing of the most insidious argument put forward by the defenders of the current policies: that the critics of Israel’s policies of occupation, control, and repression on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and Gaza engender anti-Semitism.

The opposite is the case. One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs. Demolishing the wall of silence that has protected AIPAC would help lay them to rest. A debate within the Jewish community, instead of fomenting anti-Semitism, would only help diminish it.

Billionaire George Soros can hardly be considered a leftist. He is also Jewish.

Here is what Ben Ehrenreich, the author of the novel The Suitors, wrote in the Los Angeles Times on the issue of criticism of Zionism being anti-Semitic.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an “epidemic” more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel’s apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can’t be said.

It’s not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, “turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground.

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.”³

There is clearly a wide range of opinion on Zionism that exists within the Jewish community. This fact needs to be recognized. We also need to reject specious arguments and reject false allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. We need to fight for freedom of speech, academic freedom, critical inquiry and democratic debate, at all universities and colleges, in the media, in the halls of political power and all across North America. Individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves questions about Zionism and the Palestinians based on open debate, the facts and informed opinion not on suppression of debate, intimidation and censorship.

1. See “The Palestinian Question at the University: The Case of Western Ontario,” American-Arab Affairs, Summer 1987, pp. 87-98.
2. See for example, “We Cannot Allow These Murders to Go Unpunished: We can demand these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes,” by Gerald Kaufman, The Independent, April 12, 2006.
3. “Zionism is the problem: The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace,” by Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2009.
4. See Occupation Magazine, 25 July, 2009.
5. “A Jewish state — or Jewish values?,” by Tema Okun, Mondoweiss, 21 July, 2009).
6. For example, see “Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing,” By Uri Avnery, CounterPunch, 7 October 2003.
7. “Hands off the Law of Return!,” David Turner, Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2007.
8. Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Zed Books: London 2006), p. 2.
9. America Council for Judaism, Series A. Correspondence, Subseries 1: General, 1942-1953.
10. Ed Corrigan, “Jewish Criticism of Zionism,” Middle East Policy, Winter 1990-91.
11. “An Invention Called ‘The Jewish People,’” By Tom Segev, Ha’aretz, February 29, 2008.
12. For example see, “New Israeli Scholars Face up to Israel’s Origins,” by Eric Rouleau and “Are the Jews an Invented People?” by Eric Rouleau, Le Monde diplomatique, 10 May, 2008; and “A crisis in Judaism: For many Jews today, Israel is not a normal state – it is a cause or ideal, and therein lies the problem,” Brian Klug, Guardian, 15 January, 2009; “Israel’s war crimes,” Richard Falk, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, 3 March 2009; “Israel’s Lies,” Henry Siegman, London Review of Books, 29 January, 2009.
13. See “PM slams ‘discrimination’ against Arabs,” By Elie Leshem and Jpost.com Staff, Jerusalem Post, Nov 12, 2008.
14. See “Knesset Speaker: Establishment of Israel caused Arabs real trauma,” Haaretz Service, Haaretz, 3 August 2009.
15. See “Erasures,” Gabriel Piterberg, New Left Review, July-August 2001.
16. Edward C. Corrigan, “Book Review of Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives,” Middle East Policy Council, Volume XIII, Spring 2006, Number 1.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
By Chris Hedges
Hardcover: 232 pages
Publisher: Nation Books (2009)
ISBN: 9781568584379

If you’re looking for one of those treacly Oprah books—The Secret, and its variants—avoid this one. Those books nourish like potato chips and leave most people more confused, more desperate, more thirsty for fantasies than before. No amount of wishing, earnest yearning, visualizing and New Age mysticism is going to get us out of the morass we’re in. In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges takes a sober look down our hall of distorting mirrors. The son of a minister, with a degree in theology from Harvard, a columnist for Truthdigger.com, Hedges has worked as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists. He was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. Here are some of the pertinent facts he contemplates:

• The top 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
• World-wide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the Internet, topped $97 billion in 2006—more than that of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflixs, and EarthLink combined.
• The football coach is the University of California-Berkeley’s highest paid “employee”; he makes about $3 million a year. Nationwide, full-time faculty positions have been disappearing, replaced by adjunct positions, with itinerant instructors barely making living wages.
• Collapsing and overwhelmed sewage systems release more than 40,000 discharges of raw sewage into our drinking water, streams and homes each year.
• One-third of our schools are in such a severe state of disrepair that it interferes with the delivery of instruction.
• We spend $8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense systems that would be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb.
• A family of 4 now pays about $12,000 a year in premiums for healthcare—up about 90 percent from 2000 to 2006. About 50 million Americans are uninsured; another 25 million are “under-insured.”
• We have 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars. With less than 5% of the world’s popultion, we have 25% of the world’s prisoners (1/2 for non-violent drug crimes).

Any wonder there’s been a flight to fantasy? But, more profoundly, what’s the connection between fantasy and our decaying culture? How did we get here? Digging beneath the statistics, we find an increasing number of warm-blooded humans suffering like they never have before: lost in a world of promises broken; the American Dream of endless consumption and fulfillment–nightmarishly evinced.

“A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies,” Hedges writes. “And we are dying now. … Those who cling to fantasy in times of despair and turmoil inevitably turn to demagogues and charlatans to entertain and reassure them. …” As bad as things are now—the disconnectedness, fragmentation, loneliness, im- and a-morality–we can extrapolate, interpret the trend lines, read history, and find worse to come. Hedges dissects “our cultural embrace of illusion and the celebrity culture that has risen up around it” in five comprehensive chapters:

   The Illusion of Literacy
   The Illusion of Love
   The Illusion of Wisdom
   The Illusion of Happiness
   The Illusion of America

At his best, Hedges has a “true” journalist’s (i.e., the careful observer’s, the truth-digger’s) eye for detail, and a novelist’s ear and sense of flow. His book is a compilation of some of the best thinking on corporate power, the Corporate State, the decline of the American empire—deftly knitted together with wit and a lively writing style. (His chapter on the “Illusion of Love,” focusing on pornography, is both funny and poignantly sad.)

Empire begins with spectacle. We’re in a wrestling ring with jeering fans chanting at the villainous “tycoon” actor-wrestler, John Bradshaw Layfield: “You suck! You suck! You suck!” Layfield is pitted against the “Heartbreak Kid,” the crowd favorite, a working-class hero. “You lost your 401(k). You lost your retirement. … You lost your children’s education fund,” Layfield taunts the Kid and the audience. Then, he offers the Kid a job—working for him! All the Kid has to do is leave the ring. Humiliated, that’s just what the Kid does. And in their identification with their fallen hero, in their vicarious humiliation, the anger and resentment of the audience is stoked against the tycoon. They hunger for vengeance.

“The bouts are stylized rituals,” Hedges writes, “public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. … And the most potent story tonight, the most potent story across North America, is one of financial ruin … and enslavement of a frightened and abused working class.” This mirroring of the “ emotional wreckage of the fans” is the “appeal of much of popular culture, from Jerry Springer to ‘reality television’ to Oprah Winfrey.” It succeeds “because we ask to be fooled.”

Celebrities become our “vicarious selves” who provide us with release from anonymity and drudgery—“ultimate fulfillment before death.”

Given his background, its no small wonder that Hedges would spend much of his book wrestling with the angel. “Morality is the product of a civilization,” he writes; but, in “a society that has less and less national cohesion, a society that has broken down into warlike and antagonistic tribes where ‘winning is all that matters,’ morality is seen as ‘irrelevant.’”

Ours is a culture of manipulation, one of “inverted totalitaianism.” Hedges borrows the phrase from Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. “Inverted totalitarianism,” Hedges writes, “unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers. … Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists … who author the legislation. … Corporate media control nearly everything we read, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. …In classical totalitarian regimes … economics was subordinate to politics.” In America, economics is dominant.

“The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.” We need not stretch ourselves, I imagine. The hero of The Matrix will stretch for us. So will Plastic Man or Batman or Superman. In our culture of distractions and manipulations, Aldous Huxley “feared that what we love will ruin us.” Citing Neil Postman, he reproduces a dialectic between the authors of 1984 and Brave New World:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

I put it this way: We need not worry that Big Brother is watching us; we need worry about our dual fascinations with watching Big Brother—and with being watched! In fact, we’ve become a nation of double voyeurs: we watch people on “reality shows” who are being watched and monitored by the unblinking camera recording their humdrum lives.

We are what we eat and we’ve been eating a lot of baloney. It comes to us in various forms including the petrochemical-sprayed food we eat, the Big Pharma pills we take to keep us drugged, numb and complaisant. We watch our celebs gulping it and pitching it back at us. Our politicians sprinkle it with mustard and daub it with relish.

Conditioning. … Both those geniuses—George and Aldous–were trying to deal with it: the whole spectrum of the Propaganda State grown up around the theories of Edward Bernays—Freud’s nephew. They both understood the necessary concomitants of fear, repetition, tribal identity and group conformity. They gave it different expressions, but they grounded it in the imperative of psychological re-structuring and transformation. Orwell with the gut-wrenching fear of our worst chimeras; Huxley with mind-numbing lullabies to babies, easy, commitment-free sex from puberty onward, and lots of soma.

Hedges’ chapter on the “Illusion of Happiness” addresses the issue of psychological conditioning. It would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It has the same tenor of pathos as his chapter on sex, in which one enthusiast waxes eloquent about his $7500 anatomically correct silicone dolls. (He has eight, with removeable heads, and he exults over the simulated veins in the feet and the dorsal venous arch—“really, really cool.”)

The silicone pitch in academia is “positive psychology,” or what Professor Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University calls, “Transformational Positivity.” According to the professor, “Institutions can be a vehicle for bringing more courage into the world, for amplifying love in the world … temperance and justice, and so on.”

And so on it goes. Just think positive. (Remember that Indian guru who beguiled the Beetles? “Just be happy!” ) All we need is “appreciative inquiry” in order to “transform organizations into ‘Positive Institutions’.”

Cooperrider is hardly alone. There are more than a hundred courses on positive psychology on college campuses. The University of Pennsylvania offers a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology, and Claremont Graduate University offers Ph.D. and M.A. concentrations in “The Science of Positive Psychology.” Such degree programs are also available in England, Italy and Mexico. They focus on “cultivating strengths, optimism, gratitude, and a positive perspective.” Think positively and positive things will happen. Sound familiar? Perhaps we should call such programs, “Becoming Oprah.”

Hedges lifts his lens high enough to kindle fire here: “The purpose and goals of the corporation are never questioned. To question them, to engage in criticism of the goals of the collective, is to be obstructive and negative. … If we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. Debate and criticism, especially about the goals and structure of the corporation, are condemned as negative and ‘counterproductive.’” And he’s a good pitbull here:

“Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis.” It’s a “quack science” that “throws a smokescreen over corporate domination, abuse, and greed.”

So, if you’re looking for treacle, look elsewhere.

My one cavil is with the ending of the book, the last part of the last chapter. Hedges can be polemical and he does repeat himself. The last chapter needs less polemicism and summary arguments. And I can’t help but wonder: What is the other side? Is there any way to avoid catastrophe? Perhaps an interview with one of those heroes whose names pepper this important book would have sharpened the quill: people like Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Father Roy Bourgeois, Kathy Kelly, Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Jim Hensen—what sustains them, keeps them going?

Also missing in action is Marshall McLuhan, whose Understanding Media of some forty years ago established the scientific foundation of critiquing the media—the mesmeric effect of mentally connecting pixiles; the alpha waves generated in a half-waking, half-sleeping state.

Morris Berman and Derrick Jensen have argued that we’re already past the “tipping point.” NASA scientist Jim Hensen says we should have started yesterday to bring down C02 levels or face global cataclysm.
In the last couple of pages, Hedges seems to pull his punches for a gentle caress: “No tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love,” he writes. “The mediocrities who mask their feelings of worthlessness and emptiness behind the façade of power and illusion, who seek to make us serve their perverse ideologies, fear most the power of love. … Love will endure, even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.”

I don’t know. I’m not sure. The power of love is cold comfort to the corpses and the wasted lives. Love without wisdom, like freedom without wisdom, has caused as much mischief and grief as the genuinely malignant spirits and ideologies among us. Perhaps the overriding question now is how best to organize collective action against the tyranny of corporatism, the relentless pulsations of conformity. How do we return to a “literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas”?

One book cannot do it all, of course. Hedges has trained a brilliant light on our confused and murky, rather bizarre culture. In the last couple of pages he leaves us with another powerful idea, probably as good as love. He alludes to Rostand’s Cyrano: “The ability to stand as ‘an ironic point of light,’ that ‘flashes out wherever the just exchange their messages,’ is the ability to sustain a life of meaning.”

One logical and ethical solution to the prodigious resources devoted to the “drug war” is the recognition of each person’s sovereignty over his own body. Consumption of drugs and whatever else is the decision of adult individuals in reasonable command of their mental faculties. Society (as it is presently constituted, the state) should monopolize drug sales. The state will save money fighting illegal drug sales and assure that unadulterated, untainted drugs are sold. The drugs can be sold with necessary information and warnings (ideally factually accurate information — neither disinformation nor propaganda) about the drugs, so that the individual is fully informed of the potentialities from drug consumption.

Others, however, choose to live by different principles or rules. In most societies, the ruling class arrogates the right to decide what is best for others and enforce this decision. This is the case in the US for drug use – even for the comparatively harmless marijuana plant.

Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert approached the right to use marijuana from a different tangent. They argue, in the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?, that because it is far safer than alcohol, marijuana for personal use should be legalized.

      Marijuana Is Safer
      So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?
      By Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert
      Paperback: 192 pages
      Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing (2009)
      ISBN-10: 1603581448
      ISBN-13: 978-1603581448

Study after study shows that alcohol is linked with violence: acts of aggression, assaults, rapes, and murders. Alcohol is toxic; marijuana is not toxic. In fact, marijuana is therapeutic for certain disorders – perhaps even having anti-cancer properties (as the writers note, the US government holds the anti-cancer patent). Alcohol may have some benefits for blood-thinning properties in moderated daily doses, but it is not a prescribed treatment. The writers, therefore, question why marijuana use, which does not promote violence, is so harshly punished and alcohol use is not.

Fox et al. cite the 1997 World Health Organization final report that held: “On existing patterns of use, cannabis [the psychoactive component in marijuana] poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol and tobacco in Western societies.”

Therefore, to treat drugs fairly (and alcohol is a drug) based upon “facts” established through unbiased and sound scientific studies, either alcohol must be prohibited or marijuana legalized. Marijuana Is Safer does not advocate a return to alcohol prohibition.

Alcohol consumption is largely accepted in society; marijuana use though widespread is usually done discreetly lest one risk being arrested.

The penalties that marijuana users face are many and severe. Fox et al. write, “Believe it or not, virtually no other criminal offenses – including violent crimes like rape or murder – trigger the same plethora of sanctions.”

Indeed, when US president Richard Nixon launched the official government war on drugs, “public enemy number one” was marijuana.

The Outcome of Marijuana Prohibition

The authors hold that the harsh legal enforcement of marijuana has artificially lowered marijuana use and led to increased alcohol consumption.

They identify at least one cause of marijuana prohibition as being racially motivated, an example being crazy Mexicans. This is a part of the onslaught of disinformation that surrounds the use of marijuana.

For this reason, the book includes a chapter tackling the myths and facts surrounding marijuana use, such as it leads to “harder” drug use, that marijuana is highly addictive, that it causes many traffic accidents (the writers do not recommend driving after toking), that it causes brain damage, etc.

There is probably a likelier cause for the maintenance of the prohibition against marijuana that the authors touched on: the alcohol industry has a hand in maintaining marijuana prohibition – protecting its profit margins from competition. Marijuana — “weed” — would be tough competition for alcohol.

Why Legalize Marijuana?

Society would benefit not just in increased safety but also economically. As one example, the book notes that “annual alcohol-related health care costs were forty-five times greater than marijuana-related health care costs!”

The authors contend that “modern marijuana prohibition is a ‘cure’ that is much worse than the disease”

“Why should we add another vice?”The authors argue, “The fact that alcohol causes so many problems in society is not a reason to keep pot illegal; rather it is the reason we must make it legal.” Marijuana is not adding a vice, but rather providing a “less harmful recreational alternative.”

The authors attempt to steer an honest assessment of marijuana compared to alcohol. While Marijuana Is Safer debunks many of the myths existing about marijuana use, it does not insist that driving under the influence of marijuana is safe; it does not insist that marijuana has no addictive properties. It cautions against young people “who lack the maturity” from using mind-altering drugs. It seems here that Fox et al. in, perhaps, a bid to appear impartial, strayed from evidential analysis.

Marijuana Is Safer does not posit foreknowledge of what changes will come about with the legalization of marijuana other than society will, assuredly, be safer. It seems this assurity is premised on people switching from alcohol to safer marijuana and neophyte recreational drug users choosing marijuana over alcohol.

Evidence does exist to support the premise that knowledge of the risks of drug taking does influence taking of the drug. There is a huge advertising industry based on the notion that how information is packaged and presented influences people. Nowadays, cigarette packages clearly indicate that smoking may cause lung cancer and other terrible diseases. Despite this some people continue to smoke. Yet, the numbers of smokers have declined and this is attributed to the increased knowledge of the dangers of smoking. The Canadian Cancer Society stated in 2002: “It’s clear that the advertisements work [to discourage smoking].” The CBC reported that the province of Nova Scotia had a youth (15-19 years) smoking rate of 31 percent in 2000 – when the warning ads on cigarette packages were introduced – and in 2007 the youth smoking rate had dropped to 12 percent.

The reasoned logic of Marijuana is Safer is something all members of society should take time to question and consider. Who stands to benefit from the present policy against marijuana use? What are the benefits and costs to society from the present policy? Marijuana is Safer compellingly reveals the irrationality behind the selective drug prohibition policy, a policy which puts people in comparative danger.

Many readers know at least one man or woman who has done time in Iraq or Afghanistan. Although most vets seem to adjust to civilian life once they are through with their military duty, many others do not. indeed, even those who appear to be adjusting just fine often cause concern among their friends and relatives because of changes in their behavior. The Veteran’s Administration (VA) is notoriously inept and callous in its treatment of vets, despite the best efforts of some individuals within the organization that struggle against the overwhelming bureaucratic odds and inadequate funding endemic in the agency. Newspapers run stories regularly about veterans lacking care, lashing out at family members or others, and most tragically of all, killing themselves. Yet, the Pentagon continues to push for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan while carrying on what appears to be a heated debate over whether or not to withdraw from Iraq.

Meanwhile, the US antiwar movement founders in the wake of a substantial part of its membership giving their collective soul to the Democratic Party. Since November 2008, it’s as if the bloodshed perpetrated by US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is okay because Barack Obama is leading the charge instead of George Bush. Besides the National Assembly’s call for local and regional protests against the Iraq occupation and Afghan war in October, there has been barely a peep from other national antiwar organizations. This is despite the fact that Congress and Obama have approved several more billion dollars for the wars and the size of the US force in Afghanistan has nearly doubled while the promised withdrawal of US forces in Iraq has not even begun.

It is the opinion of many anti-warriors that veterans have a key role to play in any organized resistance. After all, it was their presence in the movement against the Vietnam war that shook the conscience of the US public in that war’s later years. However, as Dahr Jamail and his subjects point out again and again, the strength in numbers and the political power of the GI movement against the war in Vietnam was directly related to the strength of the greater antiwar movement. So, despite the commitment of today’s GI and veteran resisters profiled in Jamail’s book, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, that commitment is limited by the weakness of the antiwar movement as a whole.

Jamail highlights the various organizations organizing GI resistance, from the Iraq Veterans Against the War to the group Courage to Resist. He also commits a chapter to each of the primary forms of resistance and reasons for that resistance. He describes instances of individual resistance and the refusal of entire units to carry out missions. He also explores the nature of the sexist culture of the military and the immorality of the wars themselves. One of the most interesting chapters in The Will to Resist is titled “Quarters of Resistance.” It describes the mission and interior of a house in Washington, DC run by a couple veterans. The purpose of the house is to operate as a sort of clearinghouse for the GI resistance movement. At times, the house has provided shelter for veterans and GIs attending antiwar activities in DC. It is also a place that the founder of the house, Geoffrey Millard, calls a “training ground for resistance.” In addition to these quarters, Jamail discusses the beginnings of a coffeehouse movement slowly developing outside major US military bases.

Jamal’s book is also about his learning to understand and appreciate the humanity of the US soldier. Originally inclined to consider them all killers without conscience, his conversations and other interactions with the young men and women who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan to kill in America’s name have led him to understand that many of these folks struggle with their souls on a daily basis. With this growing understanding of folks who are essentially his contemporaries, The Will to Resist becomes more than just another collective biography of troops who discover their conscience under the duress of war.

If the current commander of US troops in Afghanistan has his way, there will be more than 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan by the end of the summer in 2010. Already, Barack Obama has approved adding 20,000 more active duty troops to the 1,473,900 already on duty. Without public protest, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan is certain to continue. In addition, General Odierno in Iraq insists that US troops remain in that country, as well. Furthermore, the likelihood of combat against other foes chosen by Washington increases. Resistance is never easy, as the men and women in The Will to Resist can tell us. However, if the people who poured into the streets to protest Bush’s war are truly opposed to war, then they should also make an appearance in those same streets now that the war is Obama’s.

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life energy.

– Nikola Tesla, quoted in Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves from Work

Tesla’s quotation captures the reality of the working world for many people. People trudge off to work, do work, return home, recuperate, and go to work the next day. Most people will do this five days a week for most of the year.

Who likes having to work five days a week, having the days and hours of their week decided by someone else, receiving a few weeks in the year as a vacation time, or having to obey orders from a boss? This is the situation for the masses of people who are workers. Capitalist society is structured such that most people are either unemployed or wage slaves.

Pamela Satterwhite has written a book, Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves from Work, that seeks, as the title states, to free people from the wage slavery, job drudgery, and submission. At its core, Satterwhite reveals that freedom from work is achieving social justice: freedom from exploitation, racism, warring, etc.

The author asks questions: “Is survival at work the highest good? The goal, the objective? …to endure …in a job?”

Satterwhite likens workers to stressed caged animals and bosses to “masturbatory puppeteers” who get off on controlling the labor of others. This is inculcated in the public education system where students submit to teachers, who submit to their principals.

She derides submission to authority. She finds this to be unnatural.

Satterwhite refers to capitalists as podrunks (a term abbreviated from author Mark Crispin Miller’s pitiful-power-drunk few) and sometimes as vampires. They control the labor.

Satterwhite harkens to Friedrich Engels that labor is capital. Therefore, if people work together and share in the work, they create the wealth. Her solution is simple: a mass movement to end wage work. Solidarity and cooperation are crucial.

Satterwhite finds that most people are complicit in the system, caving in for some infinitesimal portion of political power (which she defines as “the ability to induce others to labor”). She relates one striking example of selling out in which English parents allowed their 7- to 11-year olds to become commercials selling products to other children.

She acknowledges that solidarity is difficult to maintain, being always under assault by the system, which is designed to wear people down and make them complicit.

Podrunks are Machiavellian; they oppress and wield racism to their ends. They seek to atomize and separate the workers. This is accomplished by instilling fear among them.

She argues that work can be worse than slavery. Slave owners had vested interests to care for their slaves. Podrunks can always hire new workers.

Satterwhite criticizes the illusion/con that work is a sharing of wealth. She says workers have three sources of power: the ancestors, the earth, and each other. She laments that most people don’t pay attention to the earth in them.

She analyses progress, that lofty term that is used to justify the system — the system that separates people into classes. They order and we obey. The orders, Satterwhite argues, compel people to carry out all kinds of morally repugnant work that leads to environmental destruction, mass killing, and genocide.

Nonetheless, Satterwhite argues, “Human solidarity will easily trump the politics of ‘divide and conquer’ when we decide to look at our ancestors’ stories unvarnished …”

Satterwhite calls force the podrunk’s mantra. Culture is a tool to confuse and demoralize people. Freedom, she holds, will come when people build their own cultures.

“Podrunks are organized. So must we be.” The people must grab control.

Many people call for a retooling of capitalism. Satterwhite says capitalism has to be ditched. She finds the notion of saving capitalism from itself silly. She focuses on the needs of the masses of people and not a system that enslaves the people and renders them soulless.

What to Do?

Satterwhite first seeks to answer the question: What do we want? Step-by-step planning is required, as well as solidarizing. She sees this being achieved through mutual aid and fellowship, Earthships (living in harmony with the environment), a product and services exchange, refusal of division work, and freeing children from coercive education.

She identifies the starting points as: boycotting big corporations, organizing via the internet, building bridges, claiming the commons, and the general strike.

Parecon is another take on gaining freedom from capitalist work drudgery and submission to podrunks. Forging a solidarity with pareconists would broaden and strengthen the movement against wage slavery.

Re parecon, Satterwhite responded by email: “There are many points on which [pareconist] Michael Albert and I agree. Where we differ, I think, is probably in our analysis of the problem.” Satterwhite continued, “I think that in order to be effective advocates and activists for our future freedom without bosses we have to premise our advocacy and action on correct analysis. When I read elaborate visions of our future freedom that are offered because they’re ‘rational,’…’make sense’…etc. I’m not convinced that that analysis has been done.”

One wonders what convincing evidence of analysis is — certainly not irrational and nonsensical visions. Important to both visions, however, is solidarity.

Satterwhite writes in a relaxed, colloquial style. A few times I found myself lost, wondering about quotations. Who is speaking? Nonetheless, the book is eminently readable.

Satterwhite has drawn upon a variety of sources from personal anecdotes, dreams, literature (Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, etc.), media (especially cinema), self-disclosure, economists (Karl Polanyi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Friedrich Engels, etc.) to the psychologist Erich Fromm, the scientist-inventor Nikola Tesla, other writers on topic of work like Jeremy Rifkind and Studs Terkel, and even Martin the Warrior mouse.

Satterwhite quotes often the writings of Barack Obama, and she goes easy on him because he “may well have concluded that the people aren’t ready to roll, and who could argue…” I would argue: because a person who runs for the presidency is, usually, a person who covets leadership (among other attributes such as fame, power, money, etc.), and it is a leader’s job to lead the people and not be led by them … otherwise that leader is merely a follower. (As an aside, I eschew leadership and followership. In a system with representative “leaders” and politicians, they should serve the informed masses of people and not impose on the people. However, that is another topic.)

Can freedom from work be achieved? Satterwhite points to the workers’s victory in the tiny Caribbean country of Guadeloupe following a 44-day general strike as a start. Does this sound promising?

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves from Work can be read online at The Nascence to End Work or you can request a free hard copy (a donation is appreciated). Pamela Satterwhite can be contacted at nas2endwork@gmail.com.

Many components of NAFTA favored US corporate interests at the expense of Mexico’s general population, but the Zapatistas were particularly opposed to NAFTA’s rewriting of the Mexican Constitution, in order to eliminate the population’s biggest victory won during the Mexican Revolution fought years before, at the time of World War One. “The Mexican Revolution wrote into the national constitution the opportunity for a village to hold its land communally, in an ejido, so that no individual could alienate any portion of it,” writes Staughton Lynd,¹ co-author of the new book Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History. Both Lynd (a Marxist from the US) and his co-author Andrej Grubacic² (an anarchist from the Balkans) are public supporters of the Zapatistas, who they argue have set a powerful example of revolutionary organizing that should influence anti-capitalists around the world. Much like the historical traditions of the Haymarket Martyrs and the ‘Wobblies’ (the Industrial Workers of the World) in the United States, Lynd and Grubacic argue that the Zapatistas have synthesized the best aspects of both the Marxist and anarchist traditions.

Based upon his research and his personal travels to the Zapatista communities in Chiapas where he met with historian Teresa Ortiz, Staughton Lynd identifies three key “sources of Zapatismo.” First, is the issue of land. Before NAFTA, the communal lands called ejidos made up more than half of Mexico’s land. The day of the 1994 uprising, the Zapatistas occupied formerly communal lands that had been appropriated. Directly citing the legacy of the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatistas named themselves after Emiliano Zapata, an anarchist revolutionary who was a key figure in the Mexican Revolution, and whose popular slogan “Land and Liberty” is still heard today.

Second, Lynd identifies a form of Liberation Theology that is influenced by both Christian and Native American spirituality, with Bishop Samuel Ruiz being a key figure.

“The final and most intriguing component of Zapatismo, according to Teresa Ortiz was the Mayan tradition of mandar obediciendo, ‘to lead by obeying’…When representatives thus chosen are asked to take part in regional gatherings, they will be instructed delegates. If new questions arise, the delegates will be obliged to return to their constituents. Thus, in the midst of the negotiations mediated by Bishop Ruiz in early 1994, the Zapatista delegates said they would have to interrupt the talks to consult the villages to which they were accountable, a process that took several weeks. The heart of the political process remains the gathered residents of each village, the asemblea,” writes Lynd.

This anti-authoritarian tradition of mandar obediciendo was central to the Zapatista’s decision not to see themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Lynd explains that “beginning in early 1994, Marcos said explicitly, over and over again: We don’t see ourselves as a vanguard and we don’t want to take power.” To support his argument, Lynd cites a variety of statements from Marcos, including his August 1994 statement at the National Democratic Convention in the Lacandon Jungle. Here, Marcos proclaimed that the Zapatistas had decided “not to impose our point of view,” and that they had rejected “the doubtful honor of being the historical vanguard of the multiple vanguards that plague us…Yes, the moment has come to say to everyone that we neither want, nor are we able, to occupy the place that some hope we will occupy, the place from which all opinions will come, all the answers, all the routes, all the truth. We are not going to do that.”

Lynd, coming from the Marxist perspective, harshly criticizes the influence of vanguard politics on Marxist revolutionary movements, whereby these movements have adopted authoritarian and anti-democratic practices, with these abuses of power being justified by the argument that their particular group is the vanguard of the revolution, and is therefore entitled to lead the revolution as it sees fit. Lynd sees the Zapatista’s rejection of vanguard politics as representing a “fresh synthesis of what is best in the Marxist and anarchist traditions.” The Zapatistas, Lynd writes, “have given us a new hypothesis. It combines Marxist analysis of the dynamics of capitalism with a traditional spirituality, whether Native American or Christian, or a combination of the two. It rejects the goal of taking state power and sets forth the objective of building a horizontal network of centers of self-activity. Above all the Zapatistas have encouraged young people all over the earth to affirm: We must have a qualitatively different society! Another world is possible! Let us begin to create it, here and now!”

Wobblies and Zapatistas is highly recommended to both the seasoned fan of books about radical history and theory, and the reader who is just now becoming interested in radical politics. While rooted in the inspirational examples of both the Wobblies and the Zapatistas, this book uses refreshing language and an informal conversational format of Grubacic interviewing Lynd. Their dialogue provides a big picture of global struggles against capitalism, and all forms of oppression. I myself learned for the first time that in the US, both the Haymarket anarchists of the late 1800s, and the anarchist Wobblies of the early 1900s were heavily influenced by Marxism. I also learned that many Marxists, such as Rosa Luxemburg from Germany, were themselves very critical of the anti-democratic and elitist consequences of the vanguard strategy of organizing that has been embraced by so many Marxists.

Lynd and Grubacic’s exploration of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism is played out through their examination of so many fascinating stories of popular rebellion throughout world history. Many of these stories are about workers’ rebellions, but Lynd emphasizes that while the role of workers in making revolution is very important, workers are only part of the big picture, and workers should not be prioritized over other parts of society, including prisoners, students, women, and racially oppressed groups. Lynd summarizes his theory for best making revolutionary change: “We are all leaders, not just as a collection of individuals, but as persons embedded in different kinds of institutions and communities of struggle. The framework with within which all these aspirations must be lodged is the collective action, not of taking state power, but of building down below a horizontal network of groups and persons that is strong enough to command the attention of whoever is in government office.”

To accompany this book review, I interviewed co-author Staughton Lynd, asking him these four questions below.

Hans Bennett: This decade in Latin America has seen so many successful poor people’s movements. Are you particularly inspired by any of these victories? How do these embody those traits that you spotlight as so positive regarding the Zapatista movement?

Staughton Lynd: As your question suggests, the most hopeful part of the earth during this past decade has been Latin America. The Zapatista movement seems the most significant effort, but I believe it is organically connected to movements in other countries that have elected Leftist governments. The Zapatistas speak of governing in obedience to those below, “mandar obediciendo.” The Zapatistas interpret these words to direct them not to try to take state power, but instead to create a horizontal network of self-governing communities sufficiently strong that the national government will have to pay attention to “the below” and be accountable to it. However, in Bolivia when Evo Morales became president, he said in his inaugural speech that he intended to “mandar obediciendo”: that is, he accepted the Zapatista formulation as to how it should be between elected officials and the electorate, and in his capacity as an elected official, he intended to try to live up to it.

HB: How can US organizers adopt the Zapatista’s approach?

SL: The fundamental problem is that unlike the Zapatistas we do not have communities that have existed for centuries, that make decisions by consensus, that designate many persons to undertake small tasks or “cargos” for the community, that understand the first obligation of an elected representative to be listening, not talking. Instead, “organizing” in the United States is invariably quasi-Alinskyan, that is, inspired by the methods of Saul Alinsky, who in turn modeled his work on trade union organizing in the 1930s. I was one of four original teachers at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute founded in 1968-1969, and am an historian of the labor movement in the 1930s, so I think I know whereof I speak. The Alinsky approach assumes that people are motivated by individual, short-term, primarily economic self-interest. “Solidarity unionism” instead encourages people to take small steps in the interest of the group as a whole: for example, in a layoff to share the pain equally rather than strictly applying seniority.

HB: Given that we’re living in the “belly of the beast,” how do you think we in the US can best support Latin America poor people’s struggles that are resisting both their local ruling class, and US influence/dominance?

SL: Support for radical or revolutionary movements in other countries is a tricky undertaking. The Left in the United States has over and over again fallen into the error of romanticizing foreign movements and regimes. Examples are: the Soviet Union, revolutionary Cuba, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and perhaps now, the Zapatistas. I believe what is helpful is to say, ‘The United States should cease to intervene in Country X,’ but not, ‘We unreservedly favor whatever insurgent movement exists there.’ We should have learned this from the period of the Vietnam war. As soon as the Vietnamese had driven out the United States they created “re-education camps” against which I, at least, felt obligated to protest. Similarly, when the Sandinista government was voted out of office in 1990, Margaret Randall exposed the fact that a handful of men had run everything, including AMNLAE, which presented itself as a women’s organization. So we in the US are better off when we support the withdrawal of US troops, closing of US military bases, the nationalization of US private investments, but do not try to control what happens next.

HB: Given today’s “global economy,” do you know of any examples of any US workers being involved with cross-border working class organizing?

SL: Cross-border organizing has been timid and bureaucratic. I would like to see, for example, General Motors workers in Mexico, Canada and the United States strike together. The demands of each national group of workers would be somewhat different, but so what? Instead, even reform movements in American trade unions acquiesce in chauvinism. Thus Teamsters for a Democratic Union tries to keep Mexican truck drivers from entering the United States, even though (a) NAFTA requires their admission, (b) simple solidarity would suggest that if Iowa corn farmers can take advantage of NAFTA to destroy the livelihoods of countless Mexican campesinos by exporting corn to Mexico without import duties, then truck drivers in the United States should meet with their Mexican counterparts and seek solutions that benefit all workers involved.

1. Staughton Lynd taught American history at Spelman College and Yale University. He was director of Freedom Schools in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. An early leader of the movement against the Vietnam War, he was blacklisted and unable to continue as an academic. He then became a lawyer, and in this capacity has assisted rank-and-file workers and prisoners for the past thirty years. He has written, edited, or co-edited with his wife Alice Lynd more than a dozen books.
2. Andrej Grubacic is a dissident from the Balkans. A radical historian and sociologist, he is the author of Globalization and Refusal and the forthcoming titles: Hidden History of American Democracy and The Staughton Lynd Reader. A fellow traveler of Zapatista-inspired direct action movements, in particular Peoples’ Global Action, and a co-founder of Global Balkans Network and Balkan Z Magazine, he is a visiting professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco.